Pashazade

Chapter Thirty-five 28th July

Club CdH was hidden at the bottom of a well.

And on clubnite its crowded spiral staircase stank of cheap lager, expensive scent and musty groundwater. This last was because the shaft fed down to a vast cistern strung with steel walkways and ratchet joists, with a bar and JVC sound system at one end, both on a raised area where half the water-filled cistern had been paved over centuries before with stone slabs.

Underwater lights, sunk to the bottom of the cistern, up-lit swimmers so that they cast huge black shadows onto the vaulted ceiling overhead. Only a few clubhards swam naked. They went naked not because it was that kind of club but because public nudity was banned in Ottoman Africa and even being at CdH made a political statement.

That, at least, was how Zará justified it, if asked. Besides, everyone knew E=MC2 was a cuddle clone. It made danceheads love each other. It also made them way too chilled to be able to do anything about it...

The electrics were working, the bar was stocked with Star, memory on the sound system had been loaded for tonight's mix. Come midnight the place would be rammed to the rafters, the crowd split unevenly between the majority on the dance floor and those, like her, who would be swimming. Zara grinned and adjusted an earbead, scanning bands until she found the voice for which she'd been searching.

Av was out there, spreading the good word.

That was Vertigo Voudun, the Blue Ice mix. And don't forget tonight — CdH goes naked.' He spoke through a button mike slicked to his throat. Inside his helmet Avatar had true quadsound, aural grooves cut into the lining to channel music to his ears. Stacked into one of the drag-resistant side panniers on his cut-down Yamaha WildStar was a hit-and-run sound system. The other pannier held kit that uploaded to a pirate satellite channel.

It was an old Balearic cliche to wire the bpm of a mix to the DJ's heart rate but Av didn't do cliche or tradition. He had the bpm wired direct to the engine of his bike. Every blip of the throttle upped tempo, every increase in tempo upped speed. And hard/Trance didn't even kick in until his speeds were strictly illegal.

'This is LuxPerpetua with Escape Velocity, the FNM 90-2 mix ... And remember, naked at CdH ... Enjoy.' Avatar slammed opened his throttle and blasted the WildStar and himself clear over the red line.

Zara locked the door behind her. Danger read a rusted sign. 40,000 volts. Keep out. Avatar had lifted it off a substation at the North End of Rue Ras el Tin and Zara had epoxied it to the door hiding the way into the well. So far, no one from the city's electricity board had turned up and tried to read their meter.

Known as CdH, the Club des Hachichins could only be reached by the red spiral behind that door. The staircase was six months old and ceramic, bolted together with green screws, each one the size of someone's finger. Rumour said Av had stolen it from a hotel in Shatby that was looking for it still.

Zara had no idea of the age of the stone-lined shaft behind that door but she assumed it was at least five hundred years. Anything younger than this in Isk was regarded as almost new. Besides, newer than that and she'd have been able to find it on the city maps at the Library.

Zara was the club's promoter, organizer and owner. That was, she owned it if anyone did, inasmuch as the medieval cistern was below a multi-storey car park owned by HZ International — which was her father by another name.

Once there had been hundreds of cisterns below the city, with arched roofs and stone-lined holding tanks. Every important family, every mosque or madersa had had one. Sometimes they had even been owned by individual streets or one of the souks. Most had dried up, collapsed or been forgotten. Of those that were known still to exist, twelve were mentioned in Fodors. CdH occupied the thirteenth.

She'd found the cistern before she went to the US but she'd only started up CdH on her return. And already Avatar and a posse of doormen were having to turn punters away. Clubnite ran one day each month, the date chosen at random by software on Zara's notebook. All clubs went out of business eventually, but she and Avatar were doing their best to lower the odds against theirs doing the same.

And though Av was pretty freaked about not being followed, Zara knew that was just kiddie shit. Meanwhile, tonight was another clubnite and it was her job to go collect the brain candy.

Chapter Thirty-six 28th July

'Find the man. Deliver the package. Do it on time ...'

This was his first day in the job and Edouard wanted to get things exactly right: because that way he'd have a better chance of getting chosen again tomorrow. Employment in Iskandryia was difficult. Upset one man and ten potential employers could slam their doors in your face. Edouard spent a lot of his life trying not to upset important people who might one day employ him. And the important person he'd visited this morning ran a courier service out of an office above a haberdasher's at the back of the tram station on Place Orabi.

Now Edouard had a day's work, with the chance of more work tomorrow if he was efficient. And he hadn't even had to do this first day for nothing to show he was adaptable.

What he had to do was deliver a package, but not until 11.30 a.m. Edouard pulled his old Vespa back onto its stand and waited. He'd found the right café, on the edge of Place Gumhuriya just as he'd been told, and had spotted the man in the photograph. Now he just had to wait for the right time ...

'And that was LuxPerpetua and this is Isk's own Ahmed Shaabi with Jules&Jeel..." Slap bass began to stumble in and out of a drum track that sounded more Bedouin than anything else. To Raf it was just weird-shit music from a radio taped to the seat of some scooter parked up at the lights. Three weeks had passed since his aunt had been found dead and in one week's time he would have to move himself, Hani, Donna and Khartoum out of the madersa.

He was doing his best to think about something else.

On the notebook in front of him was a list of names. The notebook was the old-fashioned kind with paper pages because that was safe. Short of looking over his shoulder or using a seriously hiRez satellite, no one could see what he was writing and he was secure in the knowledge that no pet geek of the Minister's was sitting five tables away with a hidden Van Eck phreaker, recording everything he put up on screen.

Most of the names were crossed out, but half of them had then been written in again. In the centre was his aunt, circled heavily. Radiating out from Lady Nafisa were lines leading to Hamzah, Jalila, the General, Mushin Bey, Zara ... Lines from these names led to other names until the page was a matrix of connections — all leading nowhere.

What he had was a diagram as hermetic as any kabbalistic chart and about as informative. Because, when it actually came down to it, Raf had to admit what he'd been avoiding admitting even to himself: he couldn't prove for certain it was murder. And even if it was, what chance was there that he could solve a crime from scratch and with no obvious clues.

He'd followed them all except the General, who hadn't left his house in weeks. Bought himself a digital scanner he couldn't really afford in Radio Shack and fed it Zara's number and then, in desperation, the number of the Minister and finally of Felix. The Minister hid his calls behind heavyweight crypt, Felix seemed to leave his mobile off most of the time and from Zara, once his scanner had cracked the crypt, he'd learned only that she ran a club and the GSP coordinates she gave out to selected punters indicated it was in a multi-storey garage. Which was vaguely interesting, if not helpful.

It was Wednesday, 28 July, 10.48a.m. and his heartbeat, blood pressure and alpha count were almost normal, if maybe a little on the high side. No one at the office had yet tried to call him and he'd sat outside the Gumhuriya café for thirty-five minutes — which, in direct sunlight, was thirty-five minutes too long for his genetic make-up. The heat was thirty-four degrees and for once humidity was low. All this he read off from the face of his watch. None of it really interested him.

Missing from the report was a record of the complex organic molecules gating through myriad alveoli in his lungs, flooding his blood system each time he sucked the plastic mouth piece of a small sheesha.

Tetrahydrocannabinol

The brass water pipe had bright edges. As if someone had traced neatly round its undulating body with light. The trunk of a eucalyptus, in whose shade Raf sat, was split in two at head height, then split again and again, time branching, until it ended as a luminous three-dimensional schematic, the answer to some important question no one had ever remembered to ask. He had a feeling the 'no one' might have been him.

Raf wasn't sure if he should have accepted the water pipe or not.

'Fuck it.'

A minute or so later, Raf repeated himself.

Later still, he rested the sheesha's purple tube and mouthpiece on the café table in front of him and checked his wrist. Not as much time had passed as should have done.

Swirled a glass of cooling tea with a spoon, Raf watching its brief vortex slow and die. Entropy. He was hot, his shirt was sticky and a thumb print smeared the lenses of the shades that kept the city at bay.

He was breakfasting at a felah café on Place GH, incongruous among thickset moustachioed men wearing striped shirts or long jellabas. Everybody in the place was male, apart from an elderly Tunisian woman in black who appeared every few minutes carrying plates from the kitchen, which she left at one end of the counter for a waiter to deliver. It was a face of the city he hadn't seen, where full breakfast cost half the price of a croissant at Le Trianon and the first sheesha came free.

The only reason they accepted Raf at all was because of what he wore. Though it had taken him several mornings to understand that. The jacket was long and black, and it came from the back of a cupboard on the men's floor at the madersa. It was old and had a collar of the kind that turned up rather than folded down. People glanced at him oddly in the street whenever he went out, but they still moved politely out of the way.

New clothes. The thought was random but true. However, thinking it and achieving it were different matters, because his credit card had expired along with his aunt. A fact he'd only discovered when he had tried to use it in the French boutique near Place Orabi. What little money he had was borrowed against his salary from the Third Circle, which was looking more token by the day. Apparently working for S3 was an honour; it was just a pity it wasn't one Raf could afford.

Of course, he could always ask Hamzah for a job.

Or not.

The kif in his pipe tasted sour, even though it had been cured in honey. But that's just me, thought Raf. The whole of life had turned sour the moment Felix barged into the madersa more than a fortnight back, dropped his bombshell and then gone, leaving Raf with the job of telling Hani she'd lost her aunt and now she was losing her house. Which wasn't a good thought, because it just made Raf remember that he still hadn't told her. And he really should have done.

God help her.

He couldn't eat for worrying and he didn't want to drink, no matter that spirits could probably be found in half a dozen illicit bars within five minutes' walk of somewhere like Le Trianon. As for drugs ... Leaf cured with molasses or honey was hard to avoid in this part of the city. Kif was sold ready-rolled by hawkers on every street corner and as huge, wood-stamped blocks in the suqs around el Magharba. But despite today's sheesha, dope had never really been his style and when he did break with the fox's good intentions, he used amphetamines. The basic kind cooked up in basements. Speed made him feel the fox more strongly.

But Isk ran at the wrong speed for sulphate. And while coke could undoubtedly be found behind the black glass doors of expensive nightclubs, just as dance drugs could be had in the tourist haunts, which filled nightly with German kids whacked out on substances a mere molecule away from MDMA, finding fuel to feel the fox had proved more difficult.

Besides, the fox was dying. Raf was pretty sure of that. It spoke less and less often and mostly after dark. It didn't talk to him the way it used to and it had offered no advice on how to find his aunt's killers, not even bad advice. Most of the time, when Raf went looking inside his head for the animal, he found only flickering facts and an emptiness where the voice used to be. And all taking the sheesha had done was add an echo to that emptiness. An echo of silence at odds with the street noise around him.

To Raf's right was the neo-baroque monstrosity of Misr Station, terminus for the A/C turnini that ran through from Cairo. From above, the tracks looked toylike and the dusty square seemed small, crowded and dirty, set between an overflowing taxi rank and a sprawl of flat roofs broken occasionally by the spiky minaret of a mosque, the breastlike dome of a Coptic basilica or the spire of a Catholic church.

Higher still, the individual buildings blurred into a street plan that revealed only roads and blocks of solidified city life. The darker alleys, where the sun daily lost its battle against shadow, faded out until even el-Anfushi's widest streets showed only as hairline cracks that finally blurred and vanished. Raf's throat was too tight and getting tighter as he fought against the thinness of atmosphere, fought for breath.

'Your Excellency?'

The city span up to hit him, hard and fast. And Raf had to slam one hand on top of the other to stop both from shaking. He didn't feel very excellent about anything.

'You all right?' The boy's voice faltered as Raf glanced up. 'I'm sorry, sir. I mean, can I get you anything else?'

A new life, a proper childhood, the answer to who really killed his aunt because, sure as fuck, she didn't do it herself...

'Felix,' Raf told his watch, popping in an earbead in time to hear the number being dialled. There were things they needed to talk about. Like the fact Raf had recently warned Mushin Bey that Lady Jalila and he would have to take Raf to court before they could get their hands on Hani.

'Get me some fresh tea,' said Raf, peering at the waiter. 'And take this away.' He pointed to the sheesha, now growing cold on the table in front of him.

Felix arrived just after the tea. Running his pink convertible up onto the sidewalk and stepping straight out to stand beside Raf's table. 'You look like shit,' he said, as he yanked out a chair. 'But I imagine you know that.'

Without asking permission, he lifted the notebook out of Raf's hand and snorted at the chart. 'Very pretty,' he said, about to hand it back. Then he paused, and jabbed his finger at one of the names. 'We're raiding her dance club tonight,' he added as an afterthought. 'You might want to come ...' The gravel in his voice was a legacy of too many cigarettes, years of alcohol and the fact Felix regarded anything before noon as early morning.

The fat man ordered hot chocolate with whipped cream and two almond croissants. 'Falafel or cakes,' he said to Raf in disgust, when the waiter had gone. 'No one in this godforsaken pit knows how to cook proper food.'

'Why stay, then?'

Felix looked surprised. 'You think anyone else is going to employ me on that salary?' he asked. 'Anyway, I'm too old for Los Angeles and too high-rent for some burb. And besides ...' The fat man paused, chosing his words with care. There's fuck all real crime here.'

Raf wanted to laugh. Or maybe cry. Or just go to sleep ... He wasn't certain which. Maybe all three.

No crime ...

'Oh, sure,' said Felix. 'Twice a year the winds come and the murder rate doubles, but that's keep-it-in-the-family stuff. The odd drunken Russian gets rolled, but only occasionally and then only if he's stupid. There's rape, but no more than anywhere else, the occasional mugging, the odd drugstore heist, predictable low-level stuff. But the real shit? Forget it.'

'Gangs,' said Raf. 'Drugs running, organized crime ...'

'What about it?'

'... It must exist ...'

Felix smiled. 'You want to know what my boss does about organized crime? He invites the heads of each family to dinner once a year and reminds them — politely — to keep paying the General their taxes.'

The fat man shut up after that, but only because his chocolate had arrived in a cup the size of a bowl. When Felix resurfaced, the bowl was empty and cream ran across his upper lip in a tide mark.

'Message direct from the General,' he said. He picked up a croissant, looked at it and then put it down again, carefully dusting sugar from his fingers. 'He thinks it would be nice if you gave back the plastique.'

'Didn't...' said Raf, '... take any explosive.'

'Then who did?'

'How the...'Raf couldn't remember the rest of that sentence so he finished the next one instead. 'Who ... stole ... my, ... watch?'

Who ... stole ... my... ? Felix leant in close and lifted the dark glasses from Raf's face. Swearing in disgust when the bey threw up one hand to protect his eyes from the sudden light. The pupils gazing back at him were vast and empty, black as dead stars.

Fucking terrific: he was Chief of Detectives. He was meant to notice these things. 'Get trashed, why don't you ...' Flipping open his briefcase, Felix reached inside for a Bayer-Rochelle inhaler and went back to swearing. His police issue THC inhibitor was almost empty.

'Use the rest of this,' the fat man told Raf. 'And then go to the pharmacy...'He pointed across the square to a neon green cross. 'And buy another. Then we'll talk.' He tossed Raf the empty inhaler, sighing as Raf fumbled the catch.

'A package for Ashraf Bey.' Edouard stood at the fat man's elbow, shuffling nervously. Despite the heat he was dressed in a cheap Kevlar one-piece and wore a smog mask. His one-piece had atlas cares scrawled across the shoulders in a kind of casual, outdated corporate scrawl that fifteen years earlier had probably taken some account exec three breakdowns and most of a week just to brief.

Edouard was worried. He'd been told to follow his instructions exactly. And it was unquestionably noon, because the square echoed with the cry of a muezzin, and he definitely had the right café — but now the right man wasn't here any longer. Edouard had decided he'd better deliver the package to the right place at the set time and then wait for the right person to return.

'I'll take it,' said Felix.

Edouard was about to protest when Felix flicked open his wallet and flashed his gold shield. 'I said, I'll take it ...'

'You'll still have to sign.'

The fat man scrawled his signature across a pad and reached for the fat envelope. 'Go,' he said and Edouard went. Unhappy but resigned. A second day's work looked increasingly less likely every time he ran what had just happened through his head.

Glancing across the square to the apothecary, Felix checked Raf was still out of sight and gently shook the envelope which was brown, padded and looked very much like government issue. From habit, the fat man held the envelope by its edges, so as not to leave fingerprints. The only obvious anomaly he could see was that its flap was tucked in rather than glued, as if the sender had been too lazy to gum the thing shut.

'What the hell.' Felix rattled the package until a flat box slid out into the table. It wasn't like he'd actually opened the thing. What he got was a chocolate box, the expensive kind. Charbonel & Walker. Stuck to the top was a small white card with kittens on the front and a lazer-printed message.

'If you get this, I'm already dead — Aunt Nafisa.'

Which wasn't what Felix had expected the card to say. For a split second he almost slipped the chocolate box back into its envelope. That way he could watch Raf's face for surprise or horror, for any clue at all as to what was going on. Because, as far as Felix was concerned, liking Raf and trusting the guy were two separate things entirely.

But not even taking one peek was asking too much and, besides, knowing exactly what was inside put Felix in a still stronger position. Particularly if it was letters, maybe a diary, even photographs ...

Felix lifted the lid and a sweet smell grew. Not flowers, chocolate or marzipan. Something he knew so well the stray hairs had risen on the back of his neck before his brain even made the connection. RDX/C3. High-brisance plastique explos—

Glass into diamonds, shattering.

But by then a hundred eight-millimetre ball-bearings had already taken off half of the fat man's face and removed his right arm at the shoulder, though Felix hadn't yet grasped that. Where his cheek had been was living skull, yellow and glistening, one eye socket a smear of beaten egg white. A fist-sized hole in his temple exposed his brain and across his upper chest wounds had blossomed like blood-red poppies. The blast area was both precise and limited: the chocolate box little more than housing for a simple claymore.

Fractured jaw opened impossibly wide, the fat man began to scream silently at the world. He tried to stand, found his leg was broken and crashed sideways, taking the table down with him.

And still no one moved until Raf came running through shock-stopped traffic. Doing the fat man's screaming for him.

Sightless and almost deaf, gravity dragging the last shreds of identity out of his shattered skull in a heap of folded jelly, Felix still managed to make it to his knees, then spasmed and fell forward, grit sticking to flayed flesh.

It was pointless even trying to talk to a man whose throat was ripped open, whose cerebral fluid oozed from an open skull and whose pumping blood was creating tiny cascades that branched left and right down cracks in the sidewalk, taking the shortest route to the gutter. Yet the pointlessness didn't stop Raf shaking Felix. Shouting at him.

In the distance the wail of an ambulance fought the siren of a racing police car. But the ambulance, at least, would be too late. The fat man was a corpse, his body just didn't know it yet.

'Do it.' The words came suddenly, cold and clear.

Raf wanted to ignore them. To pretend he hadn't heard. 'Do it,' said the fox, who never usually woke in daylight. So Raf did.

Unclipping the holster from the fat man's belt — badge, spare clip and all — Raf slid free Felix's Taurus and checked the cylinder. It was loaded with ceramic-jacket hollow-point.

'Back,' he ordered. And, watched by a retreating crowd, he untangled the fat man's coat from a broken chair and wadded it into a bundle to act as a pillow for Felix. Then, rolling Felix on to his front almost as if for sleep, Raf put the muzzle to the point where the fat man's skull met his neck and softly squeezed. What was left of Felix's head exploded, along with a chunk of pavement below. It was only luck that stopped ricocheting fragments taking out Raf's own eye.

Friendship came with a price that both of them had just paid.

Sirens split the shocked silence that followed. Jellaba-clad gawpers scattered suddenly as a cruiser slid to a halt kitty-corner to Place Gumhoriya. Out of its doors came two armed officers in flak jackets, assault rifles at the ready. But by then Raf was already gone: retreating through the crowd, the fat man's gun thrust into one pocket.

He jumped a tram, standing at the back on its open wooden platform, slipping off at a crossing to cut through a narrow alley full of empty shops and boarded-up houses. A builder's board promised total redevelopment. The completion date for the project was two years before Raf had arrived in Isk.

The smell of urine and damp earth filled his nostrils, coming from houses that had fallen in on themselves to become gardens kept lush by sewage leaking from a shattered pipe. The area was full of blind alleys and cluttered yards. Sometimes two blocks was all it took to slide from comfort to abject poverty — or vice versa. Money clung to the boulevards and the coast. Cut back from those and the city of the poor was always there. The cities of darkness, of brothels and lies. Old beyond meaning or memory, desolately grand and running by unspoken rules.

Raf was beginning to feel horribly at home.

He stepped through an open door into a deserted house and kept going until he reached a locked door at the rear. One kick opened it and Raf found himself watched by an old woman as he crossed her courtyard and stepped out into a crowded street.

It was only when Raf stopped, looked round and tasted the sweetness of blood at the corner of his mouth that he realized a sliver of pavement had opened his cheek clean as a blade.

RenSchmiss

Chapter Thirty-seven 28th July

The water lights were off, the house lasers down. Somewhere at the other end of the vaulted room, a band was tuning up. And here, where tiny waves splashed against the rough stone of a cistern wall, Zara had wrapped herself in the darkness. Below her feet had to be the bottom of the cistern but she had only a sense of hanging over emptiness.

Three months before, a stoned-cold immaculate Danish boy had gripped tight to a rock and let the water close over him. Only to drop his ballast and kick upwards. He claimed to have seen a skeleton on the bottom, arms crossed over its chest. And people did disappear in Isk. Disappear completely. But Zara didn't really believe the story of the skeleton. Something had gone wrong with a batch of E/equals that month.

All the same, she did believe the darkness was occupied. Because whenever she left other swimmers behind and slid herself into a dark corner far away from the safety of the steps leading up to the dance floor, she could sense that something down there was aware she was there, hanging in the water above whatever it was.

Though maybe that was just E/equals too, from way back ...

Now was chill-out time. Av's decks were deserted. The huge bank of smart lights rippled rather than throbbed, stilled by the lack of strong beat to catch and follow. Up on stage, out of her sight, four elderly black guys were coming to the end of an acoustic set — well, mostly ... Something intrinsically West Coast ethnic that mixed Cape Verde with Mbalax and Soukous. A click track hiccuped from a child's beatbox, almost lost beneath balafon and sabar.

And the fit sounded loose but was actually tight and Zara felt relaxed for the first time in weeks, though that could have been from mixing Mexican with Moroccan.

Zara sighed. And kept sighing until the water closed over her again and bubbles like large pearls rose from her lips as she raised her arms and slid deeper. She would have gone deeper still but the pearls were gone. So she kicked once and glided to the surface.

'Going down, floating up ... Guess you could call that an Ophelia complex,' said a voice right beside her. 'Oh no,' it countered, 'because then you'd be wearing some clothes ..."

Instinct made Zara cover her breasts, and water made her choke as her head bobbed below the surface. When she'd finished coughing, she concentrated on swearing. She knew who it was.

What she didn't recognize was the voice of whoever spoke next.

That was rude.'

Arms splashed up to snake round Zara's neck and Hani was suddenly glued fast like a limpet. She was grinning in the darkness. Breathing hard, though at first Zara thought that was from the swim. Then she realized the child was excited, dangerously excited.

'He hit a big man at the door,' said Hani. There was a horrified fascination in her voice.

'He wouldn't let us in,' Raf said apologetically.

Zara snorted, her face hidden in shadow until Raf adjusted his eyes and she came into view as cleanly as if someone had toggled the brightness on a screen.

'He didn't get up,' Hani added.

'Unconscious,' insisted Raf hastily, 'nothing worse. I had to see you ...'

'Why?'

Of all questions it was the simplest to ask and the hardest to answer. Had Raf been thinking clearly, or even at all, he might have known he was in shock from Felix: seeing someone killed did that to you. But he wasn't supposed to do shock, at least not according to the wretched genetic-heritability guarantee. And anyway, he had more than one reply to her question.

Club. Felix. Hani , .. which came first?

Raf had to remind himself that Zara couldn't see in the dark, that her hearing was probably only average. So she might have missed the thud of heavy boots as bouncers criss-crossed the club searching for him. Pretty soon one of the bone clones would engage his brain and decide to fire up the water lights.

Except that they were about to be cornered themselves, if the distant clang of a door and abrupt trill of sirens at the high edge of his range was any clue.

'You're being raided,' Raf told Zara.

'Shit...'She sounded almost grateful.'That's what you came to tell me?'

No, he'd come to beg her to look after Hani and to tell her was Felix was dead. Just like his aunt was dead. This city was turning into a personal war-zone and he was still busy trying to spot the enemy.

Raf shook his head, remembered she couldn't see him and opened his mouth to speak. But it was already too late. Up on the spiral, a riot cop using a throat mike attached to the kind of bass-heavy public hailer that turns your guts to water and dribbles them round your feet was demanding that Someone Turn On The Lights. NOW ...

'How many ways in?' Raf felt an adrenalin rush kick-in with a vengeance. The fox was back on line.

'One,' said Zara.

Even Hani groaned.

'Two,' Zara amended, then corrected herself again. 'Three ... Do storm drains count?'

Hani grabbed her tee-shirt from a corner where she'd left it and scooped up Ali-Din while Zara went looking for her clothes, which should have been folded neatly beneath a bench. Raf's own suit was sodden but at least he was wearing it.

'You need new clothes,' Raf ordered.

Zara opened her mouth to protest but Raf was gone, sliding off in a different direction towards a blonde girl in spray tights, a snakeskin waistcoat that might once have slithered and a long trench coat cut from wafer-thin faux ocelot. Zara couldn't hear what Raf said but the girl handed over her coat without comment.

'Use this.' He stood between Zara and the worst of the crowd while she struggled into the coat. Searchlights were in use but the house system seemed down. If Avatar had any sense, thought Zara, he'd have pulled the fuses.

'Over there ...' Zara said, nodding to a wall that lit and vanished as a hand-held hiLux hit the stonework and then swept back over the restless crowd. The crash squad were still looking for the main switch.

"... We need to get over there.'

Covering part of the wall was a swirl curtain that shimmered with an infinitely ridiculous number of infinitesimally small fluorescent beads trapped between its warp and weft. Raf didn't really have time to admire the effect. His brain was rich with theta waves that rolled across his cortex, firing neurones. Behind his eyes was a memory of Zara naked, soft hips and no body hair. Her legs long, her stomach almost flat. Water rolling in droplets between full breasts.

Sweet memories that stopped him remembering ugly things. Like blood turning black in a gutter or a breeze-blown fragment of ribbon fluttering across the road towards him.

'He wasn't listening,' Hani said.

Zara sucked her teeth, crossly. 'This way,' she ordered and ducked under the curtain. Her fingers twisted and fluorescence blossomed from a broken trance tube. They were inside a packed alcove that was arched over with crumbling red brick, and around them was rubbish, mostly broken beer boxes or empty industrial-size containers of still mineral water. Someone's knickers lay discarded on the floor.

Beyond the alcove was a gap where a storm drain fed into the cistern from the street. Clearly visible on the wall were crumbling iron handholds, rusted with age.

'You first,' Zara told Hani, 'Me next, Ashraf last ...'

That was the order in which they went and that was the order in which the morales arrested them in the narrow side street where the drain began. With Raf climbing out to find Hani silenced by a hand over her mouth, while Zara stared furiously at a gendarme officer with skin the colour of pure chocolate and a bottle-green uniform so immaculate it must have come straight out of a box.

Overhead an ex-Soviet copter, with a searchlight now fixed to the side of its gun bubble, pinned Raf in its beam then flicked its attention to another street as soon as the officer moved in, Colt held tightly in her hand.

'AshrafBey,' she said, looking in shock at Raf's still-dripping suit.

'Yeah,' said Raf. 'Me.'

Behind the officer were two privates and at the end of the narrow street was a green van the same colour as the woman's uniform. Its rear doors were open and waiting.

Been here, thought Raf, done that. Not doing it again.

There were three ways it could go. She could let him walk, try to arrest him or call for advice and back-up. Only the first was any good to him and Raf didn't see it happening. Not if the screen-splash he'd caught at the madersa had been right and the IPD were busy nailing Felix to his forehead like the mark of Cain.

Crunch time came as the officer lifted her wrist to her face, ready to call HQ.

'Don't even think about it.' Raf had the fat man's gun out of his sodden pocket and in his hand before she had time to do much more than flinch. Her own weapon still pointed lazily at the ground. She'd got the uniform all right, she just hadn't got the moves.

'Fuck up and I'll kill her,' Raf told the two privates. 'Understood?' The gun wasn't the only thing he'd borrowed from Felix. The sudden hard-ass drawl also belonged to the fat man.

'Your watch,' Raf demanded.

Bottle-green handed it over with a scowl that turned to distilled hatred as Raf tossed her elegant mobile straight down the storm drain. Now her HQ could pinpoint it all they liked.

'Going to shoot me too?' The woman's voice was cold, her contempt unchecked. Raf didn't know quite what she saw when she looked at him but it was something she hated. He wasn't too sure he liked it that much himself.

'Felix was dying,' Raf said shortly. Which was true. Half of the fat man's skull was gone, his brain a fat slug that gravity enticed towards the pavement.

'This man murdered Felix Bey.'

For all the attention the officer gave the gun in his hand, Raf might as well have been unarmed. Except then, of course, he'd have been under arrest already.

'There was a bomb,' said Raf, seeing shock explode in Zara's eyes. 'Felix took the full blast.'

Zara pushed hair out of her face and stared at Raf. 'You finished him off?'

'Yeah.' Raf nodded. 'What was my option? Let him exist on life support, wired up and quadriplegic, surviving on sugar-water and vitamins?'

With definitely no alcohol, no illegal porn channels and no working gearstick to engage even if he did. 'He'd have hated it.'

'So you got to play God?' That was the officer.

'Someone has to ..." Raf spun the Colt round his finger, stepped in close and jammed the gun under bottle-green's chin.

'Ashraf ..." Zara's voice shook. 'Don't...'

'I didn't kill Lady Nafisa,' Raf said slowly. 'And I didn't murder Felix.' He was talking to the officer, but Zara was listening and so was the kid; so really he was talking to them too. 'But I'm sure as hell going to hunt down whoever did. And I'll shoot anyone who gets in my way. You make sure everyone gets that message.'

Lifting the gendarme's Colt from her lifeless fingers, Raf tossed it after the watch and then walked her to the rear of her van, with the two squaddies following meekly behind. She climbed into the riot van without being asked.

'Now you,' he ordered and the squaddies scrambled inside, jostling each other in their haste. They stank of sweat, fear and kif. Which was what you got if you conscripted fellah who just didn't want the job. Still smiling, Raf slammed the rear doors, locked them and dropped their electronic key through the grille of a storm drain.

'Coming ... ?'

Watchful and unhappy, Zara shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'Running away only makes things worse.'

Raf's laugh was sardonic. 'You obviously never tried it.'

Chapter Thirty-eight 29th July

Sudden and abrupt, Raf's kick echoed off the side of a derelict Customs shed, booming out over rusty tracks to the night-time emptiness of the docks beyond. No lights came on anywhere, no security guard ambled out of the darkness to find out what was going on.

The stretch of crumbling tenement south of Maritime Station was that kind of area. Low concrete housing with rusted bars for shutters and blank squares of chipboard where glass should be. Cancerous enough to make every project block Raf had ever seen look suddenly rich

'For me ...' Raf announced, as he kicked again at the steel door of the deserted warehouse, under a peeling signboard that read Pascarli & Co, Cotton Shippers, '... her timing makes no sense. That's the problem.'

He'd talked his way through the first two diagrams in his notebook, skipped the autopsy data as being much too upsetting for Hani, and was back to chasing timescale round in his head. Who was where, when?

He was talking to Hani because it beat bouncing ideas off thin air and the fox was back in hiding, or dead. Or both. At least the kid had Ali-Din to talk to, not that she spoke much to her rag dog either these days.

Hani was worried about something but asking her directly about it hadn't worked. Though he'd tried that several times, starting when he'd got back to the madersa after Felix flatlined. All he'd got in return was sullen silence.

Back then, Raf hadn't told the small girl the fat man was dead: any more than he'd told her they had to leave the house.

Just asked his question and regretted getting no answers. But scaring kids wasn't his style. And besides, Raf could remember a time when he too had shut right down, until the adults round him began to say his lights were on but no one was home. And he had been home, of course — he just wasn't answering the door...

'You see,' Raf said. 'Aunt Nafisa went to a committee meeting at C&C at 10 a.m.' He used a.m. because that was what Hani knew. Lady Nafisa had thought the 24-hour clock vulgar. 'She left her meeting at eleven, but didn't get home until one. So where was she ... ?

'Now,' said Raf, answering his own question. 'She could have been shopping.' He kicked one last time at the door and it flew back to reveal damp-smelling darkness. 'But then, what happened to her parcels?'

But it wasn't shopping, because Lady Nafisa didn't buy things when other people were about. She made stores open for her specially, at night, when she could count on the manager's full attention.

Through here,' Raf told the girl and stepped into a musty darkness, nudging the door shut with his heel. Her fingers in his hand felt as fragile as twigs and almost as dry. She hadn't yet asked Raf why he'd really shot the fat man. But as she'd trotted through the night towards the docks, the child had tossed possible answers around in her head and not liked most of them.

It had been Ali-Din's job to find the warehouse. And the way it worked was that every time a crossroads appeared, Hani would stare at the eyes of her rag dog and then nod left or right depending on which eye blinked. If neither lit then the route was straight ahead. The puppy ran on some kind of satellite positioning system matched to a template of Iskandryia.

Hani's slight thaw had lasted until they reached the end of Fuad Premier, where a narrowing boulevard intersected with Rue Ibrahim and rattling midnight trams ran south-west from Place Orabi towards a rail terminus and the Midas Refinery stockyard.

The address Zara had given Raf was on the far side of the tramline, in an area where ramshackle souks gave way to near-derelict tenements before ending in a stink of sewage, rotting fish and diesel that leached from rusting dockside cranes dotting a cancerous concrete wilderness at the south-east end of Western Harbour.

It was dog-shit city.

A whole area of festering poverty that the Rough Guide didn't mention, other than to suggest that visitors should keep to the main routes during the day and avoid the place altogether at night. The official city guide omitted any mention of the area.

And, in a sense, the tenements and sprawl of empty warehouses didn't exist for most people in Iskandryia: for them, the slums were invisible and unnoticed, except by felaheen who didn't vote or would only have voted the wrong way if they did. America might stack its urban poor one family on top of another in high-rise blocks but in North Africa the poor were marginalized in a more literal sense ... They lived at the barren edges of its cities or in occupied unwanted spaces like this one — which existed between a tramline and the dockside railway, was edged along its third side by a canal and slid, on its one good side, from squalor through poverty to the almost picturesque as it finally meshed with the souks of the El Gomruk ...

'Up here,' said Raf, reaching a ladder. His voice echoed inside the empty warehouse the way kicking down its door had echoed off derelict buildings outside.

Above was a prefabricated office, slung between two steel girders originally added to strengthen the brick walls of the warehouse. The spiral staircase that should have led up to it was missing, so maybe Zara's tale of an upset hotel was untrue.

'Can't see,' Hani protested. She sounded cross and upset, but at least she'd started talking.

'I can,' said Raf. 'I'll go first and you follow after.' Part of him wanted to do it the other way round — so that he could catch Hani in case she slipped — but it was impossible to know what he might find in the office, so he went first. He could have made her stay below, of course, but he knew the child would like that even less.

'How can you see?' Hani asked scornfully. 'It's dark.'

'Ali-Din can see in the dark.'

'That's different.'

'Why?'

'Because Ali-Din is only ..."

Her voice trailed away and Raf started climbing. Left hand pulling him up the ladder, his right tightly gripping the fat man's revolver.

The prefab was empty of people and full of kit. Each wall was smothered with cheap Ikea shelving, the bolt-together kind. Metal tables were pushed hard against the shelves. The only gap on the walls was a window, that would have looked north along the dockside towards Maritime Station if someone hadn't covered it over with tar paper and taped along all the edges. There was a sourly mechanical, almost chemical stink to the place, underlaid with stale tobacco.

Most of the kit in the room was instantly recognizable, like two stand-alone Median PCs and an Apple laptop with a fold-out satellite dish, which was definitely illegal. Plus a stack of vinyl piled next to a Blaupunkt mixing desk. The rest of the apparatus was far weirder. Starting with a full scuba suit, matching quadruple oxygen bottles and a shrink-wrapped box of sterile 1000ml beakers stacked next to the entrance hatch.

And someone had gone to the trouble of dragging plastic drums of distilled water up to the office. But that was the least of it. In one corner was a Braun freezer, wired to a bank of car batteries. In the opposite corner, a cupboard made of glass had an extractor hood taped and double-taped to its top, with a duct leading straight out through an outside wall.

On a table by the cupboard a long glass spiral of tubes fed down to a sealed beaker and every ring in the spiral was joined to the next with a ground-glass joint. Jammed between two of the rings was a half-smoked packet of untipped Cleopatra, while a battered paperback copy of Uncle Fester's Organic Chemistry leaned against the beaker. The Fester's was the edition with a skull on its cover.

Inside a medical chest placed on the floor next to the table were bandages, burn salve, spray skin, surgical glue, a small canister of Japanese oxygen and a box of surgical gloves. There were also a dozen more packets of untipped Cleopatra.

'What have you found?' Hani demanded.

'A kitchen,' said Raf as he returned to the trap door and put out a hand to help her up, 'but not the kind you know.' He tried not to mind that the child flinched away from his grip.

'Wake up,' said Hani.

Raf came to on his feet. Banging into shelving as he spun, hand going for his shoulder holster before he remembered he didn't wear one these days and the gun was in his pocket.

Instinctively, he checked the fat man's revolver, fast-flipping the cylinder. Out and in. The weapon was one shot light — as if he could forget.

Still, with luck, whoever Ali-Din said was coming wouldn't know that.

'Ali-Din ...?'

Raf stopped.

'How does Ali-Din know someone's coming?

In answer, Hani put her puppy on a table by the taped-over window. The rag dog shuffled round and swung its large head until its eyes stared at where the tenements would be visible in the early-morning daylight, if only plyboard and tar paper hadn't replaced the glass. When its head stopped swaying, its blue-buttoned tail started to wag, like a faulty metronome.

'Don't tell me,' Raf said. 'The nearer the person, the faster the wag?'

Hani nodded.

'So it's a friend?'

Hani's eyes went wide, impressed at his grasp.

'A friend?' Raf stressed, even though he already knew the answer.

Whoever had given the toy to Hani had chosen an expensive model. Though the mechanics couldn't be that difficult. To greet or growl the unit wouldn't even need satellite tracking — not the visual kind, anyway. Simple band scanning could check numbers on a mobile against basic visual recognition software and have the wag or growl defined either by how the child had reacted visually to that person before, or else, if the unit was really expensive, by reading off stress levels or beta waves.

There'd be a time lag of a few seconds but nothing too difficult to hide.

'Tell me,' said Raf, as he pocketed the revolver and headed for the trapdoor. 'Wag or growl? Which did Ali-Din do when he saw Aunt Nafisa?' Hani still hadn't answered when he reached the bottom of the ladder ...

'Sweet fuck.' Raf forgot all about saying hello to Zara. Instead he stepped out into the morning glare, scrabbling for his dark glasses. He still couldn't get used to the North African sun, not after the grey skies of Seattle and the equally soft skies of Switzerland and Scotland before that.

Zara was dressed in tight black jeans, matched with a white silk shirt with long sleeves, no bra and only flip-flops on her feet. But it was her split lip he noticed.

'Leave it,' she said, when he tried to check the swelling. She stopped outside the warehouse door, refusing to go any further. 'I want to know why you shot Felix ...'

'He was already dying. I just speeded it up.'

Zara sighed. 'How very macho.' She pulled a print of Iskandryia Today from under her arm. 'You sure it wasn't because he told the truth about Lady Nafisa's suicide?'

'How do you ... ?' Raf demanded.

'The whole city knows,' said Zara and shoved the front page in his face. Felix stared out, looking fifteen years younger and a hundred pounds thinner than when Raf had last seen him. There was no picture of Raf, though the words Suicide, Lady Nafisa, and Ashraf Bey made cross-heads down two columns on the right.

'Nafisa didn't commit suicide,' Raf said flatly. 'She was too devout, too respectable.' He put heavy stress on the last word, and knew it to be true. Delete and discard were functions his unconscious had never had to master. He could actually see Lady Nafisa, alive inside his head, retiring to her room five times a day for prayers. See her reprimanding Hani for playing with Ali-Din that first Friday when the child should have been reading quietly or practising needlework.

Suicide was a sin.

Besides, she was too selfish, too in love with who she was to throw over worldly grandeur without a fight. Lady Nafìsa didn't cast herself into darkness. Someone forced her through that door ...

'There's been a couple of people on the radio who agree it wasn't suicide,' said Zara. 'They say it was you.'

'Me?' Raf stopped, shook his head and stared at the picture of Felix. He hadn't murdered the fat man and he hadn't killed his aunt. And Raf didn't need to stake his life on it, because he already had.

The raid on CdH also made the front page, but much smaller. And the picture of Zara was a paparazzi shot, snatched outside the Precinct as she clambered from the back of a riot van.

The copy didn't actually need to say she'd been naked beneath her coat when arrested, because the valley of shadow just above where the faux ocelot buttoned told its own story. Which hadn't stopped the paper stressing her nakedness three times in three paragraphs.

'What did they do to you?' Stepping forward, Raf took Zara's chin gently between first finger and thumb and turned her cheek to the light. A heavy bruise could just be seen beneath carefully applied concealer. One eye was also bruised and bloodshot, though Zara hadn't bothered with belladonna drops. No amount of eye brightener would be enough to hide her puffy eyelids or the redness where tears had dried.

Without thinking, Raf put an arm round her shoulder to help Zara into the warehouse, and felt rather than just heard her intake of breath and sudden hiss of pain.

'Forget it,' said Zara, brushing his apology away with a sour smile. 'No one else seems to think it's important. So what do you think of the place?' She stepped past him and into the warehouse. The collective use it. I just pay the rent.'

'The collective?'

'Friends

'But you all share the profits?'

Zara shook her head. 'I let them sell stuff at the club, at their own risk. CdH takes nothing off the top ... Took,' she corrected herself. 'We took nothing off the top.'

'Doesn't look like that made a difference,' said Raf, one finger tracing a raw welt that ran round the side of her neck. Its edges were puffy and pinpricked with blood. This time Zara didn't flinch.

'Bastards,' said Raf.

Zara laughed. 'You think the police did this?' There was a slow-burn anger in her voice, like slightly damp black power getting itself ready to hiss and flare. 'The morales were politeness itself. Even drove me back to Villa Hamzah in an unmarked car. This is my mother's handiwork.'

'Because you were arrested?'

'Because I was naked. Because I was with you. Because no one worth anything will ever marry me now ... How many fucking reasons do you think she needs?' Zara took a deep breath, steadying herself. 'Why do you think I was so desperate to get away to New York?'

There was no answer to that.

Raf eyed the ladder doubtfully. Seeing Hani crouched at the top, watching them with a blind intensity.

'I'm up here,' she told Zara. 'Do you want me to come down?'

By way of reply, Zara began to pull herself up the ladder, wincing at every new rung. By the time she reached the top, pain had her breathing only through her mouth, though she tried to hide the trembling in her hands.

'Antiseptic,' Hani told Raf, 'and cotton wool.' She put them into his hands and returned with a spray that read plastic skin, another of analgesic and a small bottle of mineral water ... Ripping a stained blanket off a lopsided camp bed, she nodded for Zara to lie down, which the young woman did, being too tired to disagree.

This will hurt,' said Hani, her voice serious.

'Really,' Zara said dryly. 'What a surprise.' For the first time in hours the child almost cracked a smile. But that vanished the moment Zara tried to take off her shirt and found it was stuck to her back.

Hani proved to be more than adept when it came to dressing the wounds, which she did with minimum fuss and maximum patience, stopping every time Zara swore or jerked under her touch. When one blast of analgesic proved not enough, Hani resprayed Zara's bare back and counted up to fifteen before she began again to lift off dried blood with wet cotton wool.

Though Hani's proficiency wasn't what held Raf's attention. What gripped it — so tightly he had to remind himself he'd actually seen Zara naked, not just without her shirt — was the curve of one full breast as it pressed out at the side, as she lay face down on that rickety camp bed. He'd seen his share of naked women, although none of them quite that beautiful; but this was heartbreakingly different, and he felt the breast's shape in his head like a shiver.

Somewhere in his psycho-profile files at Huntsville there was probably an explanation. Which, no doubt, Dr Millbank would have been happy to expound. Back there sex was something to be talked about, analysed and discussed, preferably in open meetings. In return, Huntsville ran 'access weekends' in a block of log cabins that looked like a bad lakeside motel. Every window had red checked curtains, little beds of nasturtiums prettied up both sides of the front door and books stood in neat rows on shelves inside, along with framed prints of snowcapped mountains and a fridge full of Miller Lite and that pale Mexican beer. The low-rent kind that made it hard to get drunk.

But the normalizing touches were irrelevant. All anyone was really interested in were the big Shaker beds with their disposable sheets that got replaced each morning.

It hadn't mattered that Raf had no one to come visiting. At the end of his first month Dr Millbank signed him off as in need of ongoing psychosexual therapy. His designated therapist was a blond academic in her early thirties who was writing a thesis on regressive institutionalization. One weekend the academic didn't arrive and a dark-haired serious Canadian student of hers turned up instead. All the Canadian wanted to do was heavy pet and then take breaks to make notes. It was from the student that Raf learned his therapist had been working on the same paper for eleven years. Which sounded pretty institutionalized to him ...

When Zara's welts were clean, Hani sterilized the area with antiseptic, waited for it to dry and then graffitied over each one with a thick line of plastic skin; and all the while the child's face was frozen into a mask, seconds away from dissolving into tears.

'Hey, it's okay,' Zara insisted. 'It just stung a bit, you know?'

Slowly, Hani nodded. And the movement was all it took to tip the drops from her eyes and spill them down her cheeks: rendering Raf instantly irrelevant, though he didn't know why.

The two girls looked at each other, then back at Raf.

'South of here,' said Zara, 'you'll find a boat, just before the railway jetty.' She pushed herself up on one elbow, revealing a flash of breast as she dipped one hand into her jeans pocket. 'You'll need this,' she said firmly. The card she gave him was grey, scratched and dull with age. It was blank on either side. 'We won't be long.'

'What about ...'

'Hani's going to clean up my face, aren't you, honey? And then we're going to talk, in private. Then we'll do our prayers. After that, we'll come and find you ...'

The first vessel Raf came to stank of oil and rested so low in the water that any half-decent wave could lap over its side and finish the job of sinking it. The next two were small tunny boats, battered red hulls and peeling oak decks warped and split with heat. Old-fashioned steel padlocks locked tight their cabin doors.

After that was a long gap of jetty where rusting bollards waited vainly for bow ropes from container ships that would never come back. The new boats docked in the deeper waters behind him. Ferries and cargo vessels from Marseilles and Syracuse, roped fast to the jetty of Maritime Station. And beyond those were, anchored sleek grey cruisers and an elderly aircraft hangar that stood off from the entrance to the naval base at Ras el-Tin. The General was rumoured to keep certain prisoners aboard the Ali Pasha, held below decks in conditions of both sumptuous luxury and restraint.

Ahead of Raf, where shallows condemned the water to near-emptiness, the main dock came to an abrupt halt as the dockside jerked back onto itself to become a long jetty which angled out towards the middle of the harbour. The glint of wheel-hammered tracks confirmed that the spur was still in use. Probably to shunt containers out to Soviet cargo carriers too vast even to dock alongside Maritime Station.

Raf was still looking for the right boat when he realized he'd been staring at it for the last ten seconds without registering the fact. It was there, all right, in a vee of greasy water where the dockside folded back to become the jetty. Only what Raf first saw as dead water beyond the boat turned out to be the mouth of Mahmoudiya Canal, feeding from a large hole in the side of the dock.

Two centuries before, twenty thousand felaheen had died in three years digging the fifty miles of waterway that now linked El Iskandryia to the capital. The canal was built on the orders of the khedive, so goods could flow from Cairo to North Africa's greatest port, while fresh water from Iskandryia could be diverted to irrigate the hinterland. First started in 1817 on the orders of Mohammed Ali, it was built by a French architect — as was much of Iskandryia from that period.

For the first hundred years the canal, or at least the bit that circled the city, was lined by some of Isk's grandest houses, each with a luxuriant garden leading down to the water's edge. But the houses crumbled and the rich left. The clear water clogged with madder rose, effluent and finally bodies as Spanish Influenza hit the city and, for ten weeks or so, Iskandryia emptied of the living, leaving only the dead.

Now Zara's black boat rested in the shadow of that canal mouth, lying so low in the water it too might have been slowly sinking; except this vessel was designed to ride almost level with the waves. Fifty feet long, ten wide at the stern once its chisel-edged prow had finally flared out, the boat was an ex-UN-issue combat craft. Stealth-sheeted and proof against infrared sensors.

Its retractable glass antenna was just visible at the rear. Turned off, the antenna was transparent to radar. Only in the brief periods when it was broadcasting or receiving did the inside of the hollow glass whip turn to plasma, as a single metal electrode at its base stripped electrons from gas.

The last time Raf had seen a VSV had been ten years before on CNN when one of the 15,000bhp craft had been in the middle of being freighted aboard a McDonnell Globemaster V to be air-lifted to some emergency in Indonesia. If he remembered correctly —and, as always, he did — out of the water it looked like a cigar tube that someone had pinched flat at the front end. That, and the fact it had once been the fastest ocean-going vessel in the world.

'Well ...' Raf glanced from the old VSV to the grey card in his hand. 'Why not?' There was a lot about Zara he didn't know. In fact, he suspected that there was a lot about her that a lot of people didn't know, starting with her parents.

A slot next to a small door at the rear of the long cockpit swallowed the card and then spat it out again. Without any sound, without a single diode lighting or any other clue that the VSV 's computer even knew he was aboard, the door frame scanned Raf for weapons and confirmed the card was real. The multiple check-sums matched those in memory and Felix's revolver was judged not hazardous.

A lock clicked and the door opened outwards. The cabin inside was as clean as the boat's outside was filthy and Raf realized the litter on the decks, the tide marks and oil smears were intentional. Someone had ripped out the original bucket seats that had run down both sides of the cabin and replaced them with two metal beds, a small fridge, a bank of comms kit and, most bizarre of all, a shower cubicle.

The only other thing in the stripped-bare cabin was a white telephone, the old-fashioned kind with a handset that needed to be picked up. The phone was busy taking a message and a read-out on its base announced that its memory was already backed up with ten others. Probably all from the same man by the sound of it ...

'Zara.' Anger fought worry in the caller's voice, worry winning. 'Your mobile's turned off and I've tried everywhere else. If you're there, pick up ..."

'Zara, are you there? Zara ...'

For a second, Raf was tempted to leave the receiver in its cradle and let Zara deal with her father when she finally turned up: always assuming she did and that sending him ahead wasn't her ploy to get Hani away from a dangerous maniac. But there was something approaching desolation in Hamzah's gruff voice. His fury a flip side to a love he'd probably never put into words but which was there all the same.

Raf lifted the receiver. 'She's not here.'

'Not...' Hamzah sounded stunned. 'Who is ... ?'

Realization hit him a second later.

Zara refused to use the word beat. Grown-ups either hit children or they didn't, in her opinion. Calling it something else might soothe an adult conscience but it made little difference to the child.

'It's okay, honey. You're allowed to tell me.'

Hani didn't answer. Partly because she'd never really seen another person naked and she was looking at Zara with the disturbed fascination of someone who knew that, one day, strange things would happen to her body too. And partly it was because Hani didn't know the right answer.

Hani tried very hard to give only right answers, even if other people thought that wasn't true. Other people had always been Aunt Nafisa and Donna, but now her aunt was dead and Donna was still at the madersa and other people were Ashraf and the woman standing in front of her, struggling to get into her filthy shirt without letting the cloth scrape her back.

'Do you want me to do that?' Hani asked.

Zara nodded, and sat back on the edge of the camp bed.

'This arm first,' Hani said.

Obediently Zara threaded one arm through the offered sleeve.

'Now this one ..."

'Did she?' Zara asked, gently moving Hani round so the child stood facing her. The child blushed, though at what Zara wasn't certain.

'She did, didn't she?'

Very slowly Hani nodded.

'Often?'

'Sometimes.' By now the child was gazing anywhere but at the young woman in front of her.

Zara didn't need to ask if the blows were hard. She'd faced that question for herself and could answer as a child. All blows were hard when it was someone who was meant to love you and someone you were meant to love — did love — until you finally taught yourself not to ...

'Something happened, didn't it?' Zara said gently.

Hani shook her head.

'Yes,' said Zara. 'When Lady Nafisa came home ... You saw her come in and something happened. Was she angry?'

'No,'Hani said, nodding. The answer was there on her tongue but her mouth was closed into a bitter, troubled trap, holding in secrets too heavy to speak.

Tell me,' Zara said. 'She came home and you were where ... ?'

'In her study,' Hani's voice was a whisper. 'She'd taken Alì-Din.' Hani clutched the rag dog tight, as if someone might be about to confiscate the toy again.

'So she hit you ...' Zara could understand the child's hurt. She'd inhabited that world until first thing this morning. Now her world would be different.

'No,' said Hani. 'She missed. So I ran away.'

'She missed?'

Hani nodded. She was thinking. Remembering, but not quite understanding. 'Aunt Nafisa was falling over. She shouted at me because her head hurt.'

'What?' Zara asked quickly. 'What did she shout?'

'To get a doctor — and to leave her alone.'

'So what did you do?'

Wide eyes regarded Zara. 'I shut the door and locked it ... She was drunk. It's wrong to be drunk.' Hani nodded intently, reassuring herself. 'When Donna got drunk Aunt Nafìsa slapped her and said next time she'd call the police ...'

So you didn't call a doctor, thought Zara, because you didn't want the police to come. And then your aunt was killed and the police came anyway. No wonder you're traumatised.

'Honey,' said Zara as she stroked Hani's cheek, 'it's okay. You did right. And I promise we won't let anyone know she'd been drinking.'

The anger coming down the line was almost palpable. Hamzah's fear finally finding a target it could hate. 'I will kill you if you've hurt her ... Do you understand?'

'Me, hurt Zara? I thought that was your wife's job.'

That earned Raf stunned silence. Raf could do misdirected hatred too, better than most. Raf and Hamzah were two minutes into what passed for a conversation and were already headed for a brick wall.

'You shot Felix Bey,' Hamzah said finally. As if that was proof Raf intended to slaughter his daughter as well.

'News travels ...' So did a memory, sliding out of the past. Felix discussing the General. Felix bad-mouthing the Minister. Felix talking about skimming his percentage off men like Hamzah, but still not looking the other way. In a city like Iskandryia anyone could have sent that bomb.

Raf ran tired fingers across his scalp, feeling stubble. It needed washing along with the rest of him. He felt old and tired, centuries older than when he had first arrived in the city. His face was narrower, his dark blond beard made his lips look thinner and chin more pointed. There was a vulpine cruelty to his own face that Raf didn't recognize.

The prince must make himself feared in such a way that, if he not be loved, at least he escapes being hated.

An old memory.

Well, okay, if the fox said so.

'Let me tell you about Felix,' said Raf angrily. 'He had cancer of both lungs and a liver with more holes than a sponge. He drank a bottle of whisky a day and had a daughter he hadn't seen in years. What he didn't have, when I last saw him, was medical insurance covering lifestyle choices or losing half his head ...'

The words were ice-cold, burning with blue fire. Raf didn't really know the person who spoke them or recognize the anger that shot them out of his mouth and down the line to the suddenly silent industrialist. He only knew that, this time, that person was him.

'He told me he was the only really honest cop in that place and I believed him. And, yes, I shot him,' said Raf. 'I put a gun to what was left of his head and pulled the trigger. And I'd do it again. Right now, tomorrow, next year, whenever ... He was the closest thing I'd found to a partner in this stinking sewer of a city and I owed him. What part of all this don't you understand?'

The man on the other end broke the connection quietly. Seconds later the windows darkened to an impenetrable black, the interior of the boat brightened as bulkhead lights came on and the dashboard lit with a dozen different read-outs. Over on one wall a window came to life, revealing a rolling news programme. Ashraf Bey trapped. Below it, a wall-mounted keyboard beeped once to show it was live.

A tiny voice from the VSV 's console announced the craft was shielded, operating fooler loops and running overlapping stealth routines. It also told Raf that he had visitors.

'Well, now,' Zara said, as he opened the door to her and she saw the live array of the console beyond. 'You want to tell me exactly how you managed that?'

Chapter Thirty-nine 30th July

The aged felah behind the make-shift counter looked as old as a twisted olive tree until one noticed his eyes. Then it became obvious that although hot summers and wild winter storms had beaten his face to the colour and consistency of cheap leather, the man's eyes revealed his true age: which was still old enough to have seen almost everything the city could offer, except the sight of police openly surrounding the madersa of a bey.

And he knew it was Friday afternoon and his street licence banned working but the crowds were out — and when the crowds were out they needed feeding.

'Taamiya ...' Falafel. On the cart in front of him was a stack of aluminium bowls, three wine bottles now filled with some kind of sauce and a ladle. The wide neck of a metal jar stuck through the flat top of his cart. Inside the jar, already-cooked falafel were slowly cooling.

On a separate cart, in a huge metal container of bubbling oil, bobbed more taamiya ready to be scooped out and transferred to the main cart. Next to the bobbing taamiya was a smaller bowl of beaten egg into which they'd been dipped, before being rolled in bread crumbs ready to fry. Here too were kept piles of pitta, which a slash of the knife converted from simple flat bread into a pocket waiting to be filled with taamiya, chopped salad and sauce.

The younger man took the food he'd asked for and gave the cart owner a handful of change, half of it adorned with the profile of the Khedive, the rest featuring His Imperial Majesty. Only the poor still used small change and it didn't matter to them whose head was on the coins, so long as agreement existed how much each little circle of metal was actually worth.

'La.' Raf waved away an even smaller coin the falafel seller offered as change and bit into his warm pitta bread, tasting fresh coriander and feeling oil run into his beard. He hadn't felt hungry when he ordered the pitta, had merely needed something extra to help him blend with the restless crowd gathered around the taped-off entrance of Rue Cif. But now, with his striped and tattered jellaba — that cloak of invisibility worn the length of the North African littoral by the dispossessed — and taamiya in his hands, Raf felt ready to begin fighting his way through the crush.

There was a knot in his stomach and it wasn't all hunger. Although more than twenty-four hours had gone by since he'd last eaten, maybe longer. Raf wasn't sure, because he wasn't wearing a watch, and that was part of blending in too. If he could find a street stall he'd pick up a faux Rolex, something obviously cheap and not real.

What he needed was something suitable for a jellaba-wearing felah, like a cheap Thai fake or the kind of flamboyant G'Schlock copies garages gave free with gas ... Just as he'd needed the budget wraprounds he'd picked up from a 24/Seven in Place Orabi which made the people he was pushing through look amber and ghostly. Some of the crowd had been brought here, like him, by newsfeeds or radio. Most had just followed neighbours or stopped off on their way back from a mosque.

'What the fuck happened?' Raf asked, offering a tiny coin to a woman hawking plums from a woven satchel. 'An accident?' For all he knew the felaheen used ornate politeness when talking amongst themselves but, if so, the woman didn't seem to notice. And if she looked at the stranger with the torn jellaba in surprise it was at the fact he even had to ask.

'They're searching Ashraf Bey's house.'

'He won't be there

The woman spat. 'Of course he won't. He's under arrest. They're looking for proof the pig killed his aunt for the money ...'

'What money?'

There was money,' she said shortly. 'And there's a reward for information. That's what I heard.' The next time Raf looked, the woman was shuffling towards a uniformed officer, ignoring outstretched arms that offered coins for her remaining fruit.

'Out of there.'

Raf was moving in the opposite direction before he realized what the fox had ordered his body to do. Too fast, the fox told him, its voice faint. And Raf halted his panic-driven trot to a slow stroll, pushing his way to the front of the crowd. He was helping kill off the fox, by making it appear in daylight. They both knew that. But the fox had never said anything about it, never criticized.

'Head for Mushin.'

The man he'd come looking for stood like a poisoned dwarf just inside Rue Cif, staring hard at the rear door to the madersa. What did the man hope to find? Raf had no idea. Unless the Minister was just there to be seen by the news 'copters overhead and the ground crews.

'Shield,' whispered the voice in his head and then it was gone, fading to static that fizzled and died. Raf was alone again.

Tossing his half-finished pitta into the dirt, Raf flashed Felix's gold shield at a surprised police sergeant and stepped over the tape before the man had a chance to check the name or protest. The fact that Raf headed straight for Mushin Bey was enough to make the sergeant step back, muttering bitterly about plain-clothed shitheads.

'Hey, you,' said the Minister. 'Back behind the line.' The small man didn't just look like a cinema usher, he sounded like one too.

Raf grinned and flipped open Felix's pass to show the shield and then as the Minister's eyes widened, rammed the barrel of the fat man's revolver hard into the small man's thigh. 'I've got his gun, too,' said Raf, relying on their distance from the crowd and the long sleeve of his own jellaba to keep the revolver hidden.

'You won't ...'

'I just did,' said Raf. He nodded towards the middle of Rue Cif, where the closed-off street stood dark and empty and the crowd and police looked very far away. Take a walk.'

Mushin Bey wanted to complain, to threaten, to promise Raf that he'd be hunted down like a dog — but one look at the hard edge to the young bey's face told him not to waste his breath. This man would kill him if necessary. And all that Raf knew about the Minister, he read written in fear on a weasel face and deduced from panic rising from the man's skin, unsweetened by courage.

He was no more a real head of police than Raf was a real bey. Mushin Bey was a politician, which put him off the list where killing Felix was concerned. The man had needed Felix, rotted liver and all.

'Okay,' said Raf. 'It's murder now you think you can pin Nafìsa on me, but it was suicide when you couldn't. So tell me, who are you protecting?'

'No one,' said the Minister. 'As you well know.' He sounded like he believed it. And he tried to stare back, but his pale eyes slid away from the wraparounds bisecting Raf's face, fear subverting any real anger.

It was a feeling Raf suddenly recognised. Already there was a fragment of worry inside his head telling him to put down the gun and surrender. To give himself up to authority as he always did eventually, once the brief flare of anger had burned out to leave only the taste of failure in his mouth. A death penalty existed in Iskandryia as it did in all Ottoman cities, even the free ones, but he could cut a deal. He didn't doubt that ...

'We know about Felix fixing the autopsy,' the Minister said flatly. 'What did you have on him? Little girls, drugs, payoffs ... ?'

'No one fixed that autopsy,' Raf said crossly, jostling the Minister further back towards an empty area of the street. 'Unless it was you?'

Without intending to, Mushin Bey answered with an instinctive shake of his head so minute it was almost subliminal. Raf believed him. What he found impossible to believe was that the man wasn't covering up for someone else.

'Tell me,' said Raf, 'when did you switch from being certain it was suicide to being certain it wasn't?'

'When you had Felix killed. I assume you suddenly realized he'd stuffed you up with that suicide verdict.'

'When I ... ? He was dying,' said Raf. 'It was a coup de grace.'

And then the Minister explained something that stood Raf's day on its head and made a mockery of the scribbled and intricate chart of connections carried deep in Raf's pocket. Mushin Bey wasn't talking about the shooting. He meant the bomb. They'd found the man who'd delivered it and he was happy to help. The Minister paused for a second and amended that to very happy to help. And what really impressed the Minister, and he was prepared to admit this, was Raf's idea of arranging for the bomb to be delivered to himself. What better way to divert guilt ...

'It was meant for me?'

'Don't ...' The Minister didn't get to the next word because by then Raf was bringing up his gun.

'You know what I think?' Raf said as he flicked back the hammer and positioned the muzzle carefully under the Minister's chin so any bullet fired would be guaranteed to remove most of the back of the man's skull. 'I think you know who killed Lady Nafisa.'

'Me?' Anxiety shrivelled Mushin Bey's face. Panic blossoming until it was only a matter of seconds before the Minister either soiled himself or else started pleading for his own life. And every emotion inside the man was stripped naked except for the one that Raf actually sought.

Guilt would have been enough to make him pull the trigger.

'I didn't murder Felix and I certainly didn't murder Lady Nafisa.' Raf's voice was hard. 'I'm not so sure you didn't, but you get the benefit of my doubt..." That was the kind of crap Dr Millbank used to speak all the time. 'But someone killed them, and if that turns out to be you ...

'Remember,' Raf told the man, 'I trained in places that wouldn't even let you through the fucking door.' And with that, he leaned forward and dropped something soft into the Minister's pocket, smoothing the jacket neatly into place.

'The remains of that plastique I didn't take,' Raf said simply. 'Take you off at the hips, no question.' He thrust one hand into his own pocket and kept it there, closing his fingers round a tube with a spring-loaded button on top. 'I'm going to walk out of here. You cause me any problems and I'll leave you as chopped steak all over the street. You understand me?'

The minister did.

Idly clicking the button on a breath-mint dispenser as he walked away, Raf wondered how long it would take Mushin Bey to discover that the object burning a hole in his pocket was actually one uneaten plum.

'Yes, I shot him ...'

Two wheels bit and the bike was flying. Hot summer wind rammed its way through ventilation ducts cut into the bike's aero dynamically perfect fairing, cooling the Japanese v-twin as DJ Avatar red-lined his whole way down the sweep of the Corniche.

'And I'd do it again.'

He was too fired up on the mix, too wired to check his profile in the smoked windows of expensive cafes lining the final stretch of road.

'Right now, tomorrow, next year, whenever.'

Av didn't recognize the man's voice — because they'd never spoken — but he knew who it was. Just as he knew for sure it had to be Zara who'd dumped the file into his postbox. Her way of apologizing for who the morales drove home and who they kept locked up in a basement for forty-eight hours with a pisspot for company. Though where a murderer and his half-sister fitted together... Well, that was some place he definitely didn't plan to go for too long.

All the same, the mix was sweet and its message sweeter still. Pure and illegal as the fragments of meth still burning the back of his throat. The police had cracked the club but this was his revenge.

Simple bass went nowhere slowly. The synth line looped colder than liquid nitrogen, crackling with static.

'Believe it. This is DJ Avatar and that was the Bey. Coming at you from the wrong side of the mirror ...' The boy hit a button on his handlebar: manic laughter drowning out the track and then it was back, sucking its way inside his brain and the brain of everybody else listening, which by now was most of the city.

'Enjoy ...' The bass dropped out to be replaced by a double heartbeat and the sound of pure anger, expertly mixed.

'Let me tell you about Felix ...'

Chapter Forty 31st July

A wave rolled over Raf's shoulder, leaving droplets that shone like opals in the noon sun, their salt still prickling his factor 40-coated skin. Let me tell you about...

He couldn't get Av's mix out of his skull but had moved beyond minding.

Behind him, the moored VSV operated at half stealth, which gave it the radar profile of a small fishing boat. Raf didn't even know where he was, only that the vessel was nestling between two rocky headlands off a low island that lacked any fresh water. And that didn't matter: Zara had brought her own supply and, anyway, VSVs carried small desalination units at the stern.

The sea was wine-dark, the sky a blue so impossible that, even through shades, it looked as if some unseen hand had ditched the presets and started messing with both saturation and brightness. Umber-hued shrubs lined the lower reaches of a stunted hill, their gnarled roots clawed into the thin dirt that had collected between huge rocks — and Raf could smell the scent of lavender blowing towards him on a warm wind.

They were there because Zara had announced that going there would be a good idea. And, without being told, Raf got the feeling that she'd visited the island many times before, though with whom she didn't say. All Raf knew about her island was that it was three hours from Iskandryia — three hours, that was, if one travelled in a boat that cut through waves the way light skewered darkness.

'Hey, look at me.'

Raf watched as Hani launched herself, head first, off the side of the boat to sink below the waves in a stream of bubbles. She was diving, if it counted as diving to sit on the very edge of the deck and bend forward so far that her arms almost touched the waves.

'Did you see?'

Raf nodded and trod water as Hani splashed her way towards him with clumsy strokes. 'Got you,' she said, her arms coming up round his neck: so that Raf was suddenly carrying her slight weight. The child's hair spread in rat's tails across a face that was suddenly split by a knowing grin. 'Are we running away?'

'Only for today.'

Hani nodded thoughtfully. 'Better do some more dives, then.'

From the deck of the VSV, Zara smiled as the child unhooked her arms and paddled back towards the boat. Her father, now —he ran in the opposite direction from responsibility and called it work.

Watching Raf with Hani was like seeing storm clouds clear. Zara knew exactly what had burnt out the storm, because she'd orchestrated it. Well, sort of ... It began when Raf was out, checking exactly what was happening at the madersa and she'd started going over all the men she'd known, which wasn't many. Whatever his reasons, her father had little to do with his brother and so she'd never met her cousins on that side. And her mother was an only child, as if that wasn't obvious.

Boyfriends: there'd been two in New York. She'd chucked one of them and one had chucked her, but both times it had been over the same thing. Speaking to her friends in student halls, Zara had taken to referring euphemistically to the reason as cultural differences.

Both boys had been white, both Protestant, both uptight and angry but too repressed to discuss it, do anything about it, except glower or sulk. She saw the same repression in Raf, for all that he was meant to be half Berber. He could undoubtedly do both in-your-face or reserved — violence being the flip side of stepped-back — but a straight-out raise-your-voice hand-waving argument? Zara didn't think so. Which was why, after he finally got back from talking to Mushin Bey the previous night, she hadn't given him any option ...

And for a while she hadn't been sure she was right.

Sitting on the floor of the VSV, darkness falling over the Western Harbour outside, Raf had rubbed one hand tiredly across the back of his neck and asked the kind of question you ask when your anger has been coming out of every radio in every cab in the city. And when getting home means walking unnoticed and unknown past slum kids chanting your words in the street.

It was too late to stop Avatar's mix burrowing worm-like into the city, because InnerSense/Fight Bac was racking up heavy rotation, roughly every fourth play. But Raf still wanted to know one thing:

'How the hell did he get it?'

Zara swept the hair out of her eyes and hugged Hani closer. The child was curled up into a little ball, her head on Zara's knee and the rag dog clutched between sleeping hands.

'Own the streets,' said Zara, quoting a liberation theosophist currently serving twenty-five years solitary in Stambul, 'and you've got the city ... He does it from the back of a bike, you know. Doesn't need to, that's just the way it's developed.'

'Who does?'

'Avatar. My brother ...' Zara made it a point of principle never to add the half.

'Your ... ?'

Zara nodded, 'Yes,' she said. 'Av. You met him on the tram. I gave him the sound file.'

'You what?'

Their argument went from there. And at the point when Hani scrambled off Zara's lap to cower against the bulkhead, her thin legs tucked up to her chin and her eyes wide with fright, having everything out in the open no longer seemed such a good idea to Zara and the damage looked done.

Zara had just finished accusing Raf of being an arrogant, over-bred, emotionally retarded inadequate and Raf was explaining to Zara in over-simple words why it wasn't his fault if she was some spoilt little rich bitch who'd got done for stripping off at an illegal club.

As for marrying her ...

'Stop it.' Hani's voice was fierce, her chin jutting forward and her mouth set in a determined line. She was way too cross even to acknowledge the tears that rolled down her face. 'Stop it.'

The small cabin was loud with their sudden silence.

'I'm sorry,' Raf said quietly and he got up to leave the VSV.

'Don't go far,' Hani ordered. 'You'll only get lost.'

Darkness he liked, and silence. Both of which he got, staring out over the shimmering black expanse of the Western Harbour. There had been drunken shouting from Maritime Station as a party of Soviet sailors were escorted back to a destroyer by police: and Customs boats were making great play of crisscrossing the water at high speed, their searchlights cutting across the waves. Only, the sailors had got safely back on board and the cutters had given up sweeping the waters on the dot of midnight and returned to base, leaving the way clear for small, unlit boats to sneak out of the harbour mouth.

'That's the thing about night-time,' Zara said behind him. 'It makes even something as ugly as Maritime Station look beautiful.' She put a chilled beer into his hand and Raf was glad he'd pretended not to hear the door open.

'You know,' said Raf, 'I've probably got a head full of hardware I didn't ask for and, yeah, I can see in the dark but I don't think I'm over-bred, though I'll agree the emotional stuff...'

By way of answer, Zara ripped the top off her beer. As apologies went it raised more questions than it answered, but it was still better than she expected.

'I'm pretty sure I'm not even a real bey,' said Raf. 'I don't have finely honed battle skills and I wasn't working for the Seattle Consulate when it got bombed or even before that ...'

She held out her beer and, after a second, Raf realized he was meant to take it. Then she waited, while he worked out he was meant to give Zara his unopened can in return. The beer felt melt-water cold and tasted clean and slightly sweet.

So he concentrated on tasting it, not taking a second mouthful until he'd properly savoured the first.

'What were you doing in America?'

'I've been in prison,' Raf said simply. 'Outside Seattle. I was there for a while.'

'Why?' Zara demanded.

'I was charged with murder.'

'Don't tell me ...'

'I didn't do it.'

Zara felt her lips twist into something that was almost a smile. 'But they arrested you anyway.'

Raf nodded. 'The thing is,' he said, 'I don't really know what I'm doing here. And there's something else. Why are you ... ?'

'Why am I helping you? Let me see,' said Zara, counting off the points. 'You jilt me publicly, you shoot the fat policeman, I'm not wearing any clothes when I'm arrested and you're accused of murdering your aunt for money ... I don't know, you tell me.' She looked at him, then looked again when she realized he really didn't understand.

'I'm tainted,' she said flatly. 'No one will marry me. I probably don't even have my old job any more. I need you to be innocent ...'

'And you came out to tell me this?'

'No,' Zara shook her head. 'I came to tell you that Hani wants to say something.'

What Hani wanted to tell him was that Aunt Nafisa had had a big argument on the phone months before Raf even arrived. And Hani knew who with because her aunt spent a lot of time calling the man Your Excellency and General.

'So,' Zara kept her voice low. 'What do you think the argument was about?'

Raf shrugged. They'd been talking about it all day, whenever they got a second to themselves. And the only idea he'd come up with was too ludicrous to share.

'Well,' said Zara, 'tell me this. Do you think she was drunk?'

The VSV was on its way back from the island, steering itself and running every routine in its armoury. This time round, it was Zara who leant against Raf's shoulder, while Hani slept on the bed opposite, a sarong pulled tight round her like a sheet.

Did he think his aunt drank? No, even though the child had seen her staggering round the house. And Raf was sure narcotics were out, but equally he didn't believe it was suicide. Which brought him back to murder. And if the Thiergarten were left out of the equation, and Raf really didn't believe she'd been assassinated on orders from the khedive's advisers, then nobody seemed to have a motive, unless it was hothead students at the German School in Iskandryia, and Raf didn't believe even they'd be that stupid.

General Koenig Pasha might be half Prussian but, from what Felix had said, the General tolerated Thiergarten activity and that was all. And the students at the German School were unpopular, as young men with no real cares and excess money usually are: they knew full well the debt they owed Koenig Pasha for their protection.

'Drunk?' Raf said. 'I don't know ... I'm losing the thread.'

'Assuming there is one.'

In less than two hours' time they were due to enter Isk's western harbour by running parallel up the coast, sliding between the shore and a breakwater, using a route firmly fixed in the boat's memory. And thought Zara, chances were they'd still be going round in circles discussing Nafìsa.

The VSV would take a route close to the rocky shore, running low in the water and silent, staying well away from the naval base at Ras el Tin. And yet the naval base would still see them on screen.

But it wouldn't matter.

Because, as she'd already told Raf, the boat belonged to her father who had an understanding in place with the General himself. A dozen passenger liners a day might dock at Maritime Station and still the western harbour's single biggest commercial activity was smuggling. Hashish, vodka, Lucky Strike, Nubian girls ... It didn't matter. Cargo passed in and out through Western Harbour and the General's men took his ten per cent off the top of the lot. To simplify life, boat profiles were logged at Ras el Tin and somewhere in a subset of a subset of the Navy's housekeeping routines was a constantly updated record of how many runs each boat made.

It kept everybody honest.

'Want to tell me about that hardware in your skull?' She asked Raf.

'No,' he shook his head slowly. 'I don't think so.'

Some days he wasn't even sure the fox was real. Although the malfunctioning hardware was, obviously. And somewhere in the soft stuff he had filed away a perfect memory of promises from a genome sub-contractor in Baja California that went belly-up two years after he was born. Infrared sight, ultraviolet, seven colours, nictitating eyelids — the 8,000-line policy said plenty about effective night vision and very little about retinal intolerance to sunlight.

Originally humans possessed four colour-receptors, only they weren't human then, or even mammal. The fox had once explained it all, sounding almost proud. Most primates now had three receptors only, which was still a receptor up on the two that early mammals originally had, being nocturnal. Raf had a guaranteed four, with his fourth in ultra-violet. Something he had in common with starlings, chameleons and goldfish.

Later clauses dealt with extra ribs to protect soft organs and small muscles that let him close his ears. Only now probably wasn't a good time to mention that.

Idly, Raf kissed Zara's hair and smiled when she gently pushed him away ... If she really wanted him to stop she'd say so. Her forehead tasted of salt and so did her bruised lips when she finally raised them, her mouth opening until he could taste the olives and alcohol on her breath.

'Wait,' she said.

When Zara had finished tucking in Hani, the thin sarong completely covered the sleeping child, resting lightly over Hani's face so that it quivered with each breath like the wing of a butterfly. 'That's better,' said Zara.

'Lights lowest,' she added and the cabin dimmed.

The next time they kissed it lasted until he moved Zara gently backwards and she winced. 'God, sorry.' Raf had seen the bruises again when Zara swam briefly, letting salt water sterilize the whip marks.

She shrugged. There had been worse. 'Guess what?' Zara said lightly. 'You're the oldest man I've dated.'

'I'm twenty-five!'

'You look older.'

'I don't feel it,' said Raf, 'except on the days I'm a thousand.'

She wore no bra that he could feel and, when his hand finally found them, her breasts beneath her shirt were fuller than he remembered, tipped with soft nipples that promptly puckered against the cloth.

Raf kissed her lips, as if kissing might take her attention off where his hand had strayed, and when her lips melted he risked smoothing his palm softly up over a hidden nipple, his touch feather-light.

'How long before we're back?'

Zara smiled. 'Not that long.'

He wasn't sure which question Zara thought she was answering; but reckoned this was the point where those cultural differences came in. Except her fingers were already undoing enough pearl buttons for him to slide back the sides of her shirt and reveal one full breast.

It tasted of the sea, so Raf's tongue traced the taste in a salt circle around her nipple, feeling her flesh pucker and harden, then turn soft as his tongue lapped wave-like over the top.

Zara shivered.

So Raf undid a few more buttons for himself, bringing up both hands to grip her newly freed breasts. His balls ached, his brain swam with alcohol, cheap drugs and cheaper memories but he knew that on this boat, with this person, he'd finally discovered where he belonged, where he always wanted to be.

'Let me try this,' said Zara and she shuffled him sideways, off the long seat until Raf was kneeling between her open knees with his hip pressed hard into her. Her knees locked and she wrapped both arms around Raf's hips to pull him tighter still. Her movements were deliberate, intense and shockingly private: as if, despite the fact Raf was kneeling in front of her, his hand gripping one breast, she was somewhere else, alone.

He couldn't see her in her eyes. And yet Zara wasn't totally in that urgent, rocking darkness between her knees. A darkness so intense he could taste a different salt rising to drug him. She was rocking, pushing herself forward and grinding hard against him. Each movement faster and harder than the one before. Breath hissed between her teeth like pain as she muttered something over and over. Some command or order that finally spilled her over the edge into a sudden gasp that she swallowed, muting it to a low moan that died as the rocking ceased and she pushed him away.

She was crying.

Chapter Forty-one 1st August

The Sunday-morning air held more smells than a spice market — baking bread, an open drain, wood smoke from a hamman, turmeric from a locked warehouse ...

All the scents mixed in her nostrils as Zara ploughed her way across the city, down starved alleys that turned right, then left, then right again. She was walking the bottom of a dark crevasse. Guided not by daylight, which was confined to those brief patches of sky visible between roof edge and a forest of satellite dishes or aerials, but by her inbuilt, almost perfect sense of direction. Not to mention anger, barely restrained irritation and killer PMS.

There were 150 districts in Iskandryia. Cities within the city, villages within towns. Some were rich and some crowded, a few almost deserted, backdrops to a play with no characters. Rotting houses and crumbling souks emptied of the living by the Influenza attack of '28. Her grandmother had died in the epidemic and so had an aunt. That so few members of her family had been taken, and those old and ill, was regarded by her father as a kindness from God.

Other districts were too poor to have been mapped. They went untaxed as well, because no one earned enough to make taking direct taxes worth the trouble. Where that happened, other groups levied tariffs instead, in the name of religion, protection or some banned nationalist ideal kept alive by crowded housing, open sewers, infrequent water and nonexistent medicare.

These groups paid protection in their turn. And those they paid had their own dues to pay. And somewhere high above them, like a hawk looking down disdainfully at vermin on the ground, hung the shadow of her father ...

Ashraf Bey knew nothing of this city. He thought he did because he knew Place Zaghloul from Place Orabi and could walk from Le Trianon to Rue Cif without consulting a map or needing to stick to the grand boulevards. He believed Isk was a European city lodged on the edge of North Africa.

Anyone who knew anything knew that this was at least as untrue as it was correct. There was an elegant European city of red-brick apartment blocks, stuccoed villas and vast palazzos. But it made up only one layer and that was mostly confined to the sweep of the Corniche, the apartment blocks both sides of boulevards like Fuad Premier and an area around Shallat Gardens where irrigation kept manicured lawns preternatu-rally green.

The real El Iskandryia had more layers than baklava, more layers than time itself. There was the expatriate-Greek city, the city of visiting Cairene families who appeared at the start of summer and vanished just as promptly. And the city of Jewish shops and synagogues, of rich Germans and infinitely less rich Soviets. And below all that the invisible, the Arab city from which her father hoped to remove her and his family...Money could do that, if it was used well. Take you from felaheen to effendi in three generations.

The city moved across time as well as cultures. A single turn from one alley into another could throw you back a century, to spice markets and dark warehouses where herbs hung from wooden poles, drying in the hot breeze. Another turn, a different alley and the present receded further, as the scent of herbs changed to the rawness of uric acid, of dressed hides hanging in a tannery while raw skins were trampled underfoot in urine-filled vats by men with jellabas pulled up round their hips.

She loved El Iskandryia, its uncertainties and contradictions. Its outward self-assurance and inner darkness. It was the politics Zara didn't like. But then some things in life were beyond change: that was what her father said. She still hoped to prove him wrong.

Zara shook her head, still troubled. She believed Ashraf Bey when he said he'd been in prison rather than working at the Consulate; at least, she did most of the time. What she didn't believe was that the Emir wasn't his father. And she knew that was a double negative but didn't care. She needed to see her father and, since she couldn't go home, she was on her way to meet him at Hamzah Plaza, though he didn't yet know that.

Her hair was perfect. Her make up so immaculate that no bruises were visible. Even her lip looked normal.

Straightening her shoulders, Zara adjusted the lapels of a dark Dior suit she'd just carded at Marshall & Snellgrove — having woken a personal buyer to get the relevant boutique opened early — and stalked across the square towards a building she'd never before bothered to visit, her father's HQ.

The building she approached was black, with the pillars of white marble and a three-storey entrance carved from red sandstone and modelled on a horseshoe arch in M'dina. Her father was very proud of his building. The architectural critics had been less kind. Ersatz Moorish was one of their gentler comments.

What sounded like rain turned out to be an alabaster fountain set in the middle of a sunken garden. A thing of elegant lines and stunning simplicity, the fountain had been carved a millennium before for one of the princelings of Granada. Her father had never mentioned its purchase, far less what it might have cost.

Zara swept past the fountain and in through a revolving door that began to spin just before she reached it. Ahead of her waited a bank of elevators with glistening mahogany surrounds and brass doors polished to a shine. Any one of them would take her up to the top floor.

'Miss ...' A rapidly approaching security guard almost but not quite raised his voice as he glided across the foyer, intent on stopping her reaching the lifts. In his face politeness battled with exasperation. Politeness won. His eyes had already priced her suit and noted her air of confidence but he allowed himself a second glance as he got closer, to confirm what he already suspected ... He didn't recognize her.

Zara stopped.

'Visitors have to sign in.' He motioned towards a distant reception area where a young woman stood watching them. 'You do have an appointment?'

'No,' said Zara, 'I haven't. But my father will see me.'

She punched the button on a lift and watched the doors slide open, almost silently. The security guard was still looking suitably appalled when she stepped inside. He probably had a kid, Zara reminded herself, plus a wife who was bound to be pregnant, a mortgage ... He needed the job she was busy losing him.

'Ring my father,' said Zara. 'Tell him I'm on my way up. Say you couldn't stop me.'

The man nodded and stood back, instantly relieved. He'd remember her kindness and not the arrogance that had let her walk through him, Zara knew that. And he wouldn't realize what he'd just told her — that her father was already in ...

Which meant he'd had an argument with her mother. Zara smiled. Her father only ever came in early on days following an argument. Some weeks he forgot about going to the office at all. Why should he, when anyone he needed to see could be ordered to come to him? His office on the top floor existed mainly to remind people who was in charge.

Hamzah didn't do lunch with visiting foreigners — he had staff to do that for him — and he didn't take taxis or even use his chauffeured stretch much. He walked, because money bought time and that created space for him to walk if he wanted to, which he invariably did. More people saw him that way. Remembered he'd begun as one of their own.

She loved him, of course. Feared him, too. More than she feared her mother, if she was honest. Checking her hair in a mirror, Zara brushed one sleeve to remove dust from where she had touched an alley wall and stepped out, head high, when the lift reached its destination and the doors opened. She expected to see her father waiting at the top but he wasn't.

Instead she got a small woman with tightly cropped grey hair and large amber beads.

'Miss Zara?'

'Olga Kaminsky?'

The woman's eyes widened and Zara smiled her best smile. 'My father mentions you,' she said lightly. 'Always compliments.' Zara could almost see the woman reassess her, as she took in Zara's suit, her immaculate hair, the discreet and appropriate jewellery and the folded newspaper tucked under one arm. She didn't look like a spoilt brat who got herself on the news for being in trouble with the morales. Which was precisely the point.

'I'm sorry to turn up unannounced, but I was hoping to see my father.'

Olga Kaminsky nodded. 'He's expecting you.'

The door to her father's office was ebony carved into arabesques and inlaid with leaves of pink or pale blue marble. Olga knocked once and went in without waiting to be invited.

'Miss Zara,' she announced, stopping in front of a huge desk.

Duty done, Olga Kaminsky turned to Zara and smiled. 'How about some coffee? And maybe a croissant ... ?'

'Well,' said Hamzah as the door shut. 'Coffee and croissant — and I'd always been under the impression that Olga didn't approve of you.'

'How could she not approve?' Zara said. 'She hadn't even met me ...'

Hamzah laughed. Neither of them mentioned the fact that Zara hadn't been home for thirty-six hours. Or why. All the same, he saw how carefully his daughter carried herself as she sat back in a large leather chair without being invited.

'Nice place.'

His office was everything Zara expected. Huge, with windows along two walls, the longest looking north over the Corniche and a blue splash of the Mediterranean beyond. The other looked out over the red-brick edifice of St Mark's College, where Hamzah had swept floors when he first arrived in Iskandryia.

A mountain of printouts balanced on one of the leather chairs, while an old Toshiba notepad sat open on the sofa. On the wall behind his desk an out-dated assault rifle balanced on two nails. It was old, rusty, stamped out from cheap, sheet steel. A Kalashnikov AK49. Like the fountain outside the office, Zara had never seen it before.

The whole room was a mess, which didn't surprise her. His study at Glymenapoulo was the only room her mother wasn't allowed to have cleaned. Here, he didn't even have someone to nag him about the mess — unless that was Olga's job.

'Coffee ...' The door opened ahead of the knock and his PA walked in holding a tray. 'Your Excellency ..." Olga served Hamzah his tiny cup of Turkish coffee and beside it she put a plate of rosewater Turkish Delight, studded with almonds. 'And here's yours,' said Olga. Zara got a long cappuccino and a croissant, along with a linen napkin.

As the woman turned to go, Zara realized her father was blushing. For a horrified second she considered that there might be something between Olga and him and then realized that it was the honorific. He'd wanted Your Excellency so badly and now it made him blush. Zara smiled. Her father would get used to effendi, just as he'd got used to living in a villa surrounded by European antiques. And once he was used to it he'd start to enjoy it. That was his way.

'I suppose you've come to tell me you're not coming home?'

'No,' said Zara. 'I've come to ask for your help ... But you're right,' she added, recognizing the truth in what he said. 'I'm not.'

'Do you want to return to your friends in America?'

'No.' Zara shook her head. 'I'm not going to run away. Not even if that's what you want ... This is my city too.'

Hamzah's nod was approving. 'It's not easy, an unmarried woman living alone. You'll need an apartment, a driver. I can supply those.'

'Let's talk about that later,' said Zara, in a voice Hamzah knew meant she would do anything but. 'Right now I want to talk about Ashraf Bey.'

Hamzah thought about mentioning his daughter's face had suddenly gone red and decided against it. The picture of her on the news in that idiotic coat was too clear in his head. Instead, he glanced out of a window, then reached for his cup. The coffee was too hot but he drank it anyway, chasing away its mudlike bitterness with a piece of Turkish delight. 'Eat your croissant,' he said, 'or Olga will be upset

They were negotiating, silently and without words: he knew that. Even in El Iskandryia the gap between what could and what couldn't be said was vast, and Isk was the most relaxed of the Ottoman cities. A free port and a micro-state. The personal fief of its owner the Khedive — unlike Cairo, which the Khedive held in trust for the Sultan in Stambul.

But freedom was relative. And the gap between father, and daughter still wide. In many families it was unbridgeable. The woman he sat opposite knew less about him than he actually knew about her, which was almost nothing.

He feared she'd taken at least one lover while in New York. But the only real thing he knew about her was what she'd told him the night before she flew, when they were talking obliquely about the three months she'd just spent in a Swiss clinic. Which was that she wasn't proud of everything she'd done, but she was ashamed of very little.

'I can give him money,' Hamzah said simply. 'A route out of Iskandryia if that will help. But I can't protect him ...' He wanted to say more, to ask obvious questions, but for Zara the only question that mattered was the one she asked.

'Why do the police insist he killed his aunt?'

'Maybe he did,' said Hamzah, chewing the edges off a cube of Turkish Delight. He smiled sadly when Zara handed him her napkin. 'Have you thought of that?'

'He swears he didn't.'

'And you believe him?'

Zara bit her lip and nodded, not trusting herself to speak —which her father found more worrying than anything else.

'Olga.' He punched a button on his desk. 'Tell legal to call me.' Seconds later a screen beeped and the face of a small bald man squinted out at Hamzah. 'Excellency?' The voice was reedy, the accent cut-glass Cairene.

'Beys,' said Hamzah. 'They have complete carte blanche. I'm right, aren't I ... they can't be arrested?'

The elderly lawyer hesitated. 'Up to a point, Excellency ..."

A small smile lit Hamzah's face and he jerked his chin towards the screen to indicate to Zara that she should listen carefully. 'What are the exceptions?'

Two types of murder — of a mullah or a family member — gross blasphemy before two reputable witnesses, and gross outrage of a minor, witnesses ditto.'

'So Ashraf al-Mansur can be arrested?'

'Given that he murdered his aunt, yes ...'

Hamzah held up his hand to still Zara's protest and she suddenly realized she was out of the screen's line of sight. The lawyer couldn't see her and so didn't know she was there.

Thank you.' Hamzah blanked the screen. 'My first question,' he said to Zara, 'is why do they really want Ashraf al-Mansur? And my second is, who exactly is they ... any ideas?'

He sat back in his chair. 'No? Then I suggest you find out or I suggest your friend does ...'

The meeting was over, Zara realized. And what was more staggering than her father treating her as an adult was him treating her as an equal. She'd asked him a question and he'd given her two relevant questions in reply. Either one of which might be the key. Going to America had been a good move, whatever work friends might say. And returning had been the right move too, whatever Zara might sometimes think herself.

'What do I tell your mother about why you're not coming home?' Hamzah's voice was neutral. But his eyes widened as Zara pulled off her silk scarf, to reveal that she wore no shirt beneath her Dior jacket, and began to undo her jacket's black glass buttons. At the last minute, she turned her back on her father and slid the silk jacket down over her shoulders, revealing the marks.

'Tell her what you like.'

Ten minutes after Zara left her father's office and headed on foot towards the General's mansion, Hani crawled out of her bed, looked round and went to shake Raf. 'Zara's gone,' she said.

'Has she?' Raf sat up, groaned and slid his legs over the edge of the couch. He did his best to sound unconcerned but he needn't have bothered. Hani was too busy pointing at his feet.

'You're wearing shoes,' she said.

Yeah, he was. Both of them fully dressed was one of Zara's conditions for sharing the VSV 's narrow bed, though even being dressed wouldn't make a difference if Hani told someone he and Zara had shared a mattress. Zara was under twenty-one and behaviour likely to corrupt a minor would be the least of it.

'After I went to sleep,' asked Hani, 'did you argue?'

'No,' said Raf, 'we talked.' And got nowhere, he added silently. At least he didn't think they'd got anywhere. It was hard to remember with his mind full of Zara's breasts and the taste of her in his mouth. Maybe she'd believed Nafisa's death really wasn't his responsibility. Maybe not. He'd try to work it out when his hangover took a holiday.

Where Zara had gone was solved by a brisk call from Hamzah. 'Zara dropped by,' he said, sounding amused. 'She said I should give you this.' Hamzah reeled off a string of numbers that became letters towards the end. 'Your aunt's bank details,' he added, seeing the blank look on Raf's face, 'From when I paid Nafisa's commission ...'

'Where's Zara now?'

'I don't know,' said Hamzah, 'not officially. But unofficially I gather she's headed in the direction of Shallalat Gardens and the General's house.' He clicked his fingers and the screen went blank.

Raf groaned. 'Coffee,' he begged Hani.

'Tastes horrible,' she replied. But she went hunting all the same until she found tins of cappuccino stacked in a locker at the stern. Peeling back the lid on a tin, Hani took a mouthful and spat it at her feet. 'If that's what you want.' With a shrug and a sigh, she tipped the remains of the can into a saucepan and lit a small ring in the pull-down galley. When the sweet liquid was hot she poured it carefully back into the can.

'Here,' she said.

Raf drank it while she watched, her eyes alert for any hesitation. 'Perfect ..." He sat back and put his hand behind his aching head, thinking about his aunt's bank details. 'You had a computer at the madersa, didn't you?'

'LuxorEON,' she said. 'Broadband access, running Linux.' Her voice was a dry imitation of Nafisa's at its most patronizing. Then she shrugged, bony shoulders hunching beneath her tee-shirt. 'Why?' Hani asked. 'What do you need ... ?'

Numbers rolled up the screen so fast they made Raf feel even more hungover than he already was. These were dead accounts at Banque de Lesseps. And he had Lady Nafisa's account details scrawled on a scrap of paper but Hani wasn't interested in that. The numbers on the VSV 's screen were scrambled and she had an animated on-screen helper doing something with algorithms at lightning speed as she searched for Lady Nafìsa's old account.

The computer aboard the VSV was an old stand-alone, the kind that used a satellite modem and made up in sheer memory what it lacked in speed or connectivity. It had taken Hani all of two minutes to junk every default setting and come up with a configuration she actually liked. But then, as she pointed out with a surprising lack of bitterness, if you've spent nine years trapped in the same house with only a computer for company, you get good at it or you get bored.

'That one,' said Hani as a 28-digit number lit red and the screen froze. Everything else on the screen disappeared and the number shuffled itself until Hani was left with the same 8-digit/3-letter sequence Raf had scrawled in front of him. She made a couple of passes with the cursor, her thumb moving lazily over a trackball, and the number disappeared. 'Don't worry,' she told Raf, just as he started to do exactly that. 'It's checking we're legal.'

She smiled and Raf tried to smile back. He'd no idea what Hani had just done.

'Here we go,' said the child as a bank logo began to animate on screen and the account went live again. There was quiet pride in her voice and an air of competence about her that would have looked impressive on someone three times her age.

'You're good.'

Hani nodded, taking Raf's compliment as a statement of fact. Fingers dancing and thumb rolling her trackball, Hani opened and shut screens at the speed of thought, collecting passwords and opening and closing trapdoors. She rode a rhythm that drummed inside her own head until her fingers suddenly faltered and Raf could almost feel the child's confidence vanish. When Raf looked round, a photograph of Lady Nafisa stared at him from the screen, arrogant and imperious.

'I'm going to use the—'

Hani slipped out of her seat before Raf could say anything and so he sat there, trying not to listen to the child throw up her breakfast. The water in the heads ran, then ran again and she came out wiping her mouth. Neither of them said anything but the first thing Hani did when she climbed back into her seat was to make Lady Nafisa disappear.

'She said she was living on her savings,' Hani said, nodding at a seemingly endless list of red figures. 'She always did lie.'

Nothing in Nafisa's accounts made obvious sense, but Raf expected that. And he was beginning to see the pattern. His sense of self might be fucked, but he could knit connections from nothing and call it logic. Just as the madersa had rich public rooms and the private rooms had been bare even of furniture, so ran Nafìsa's accounts. Money had been spent lavishly on clothes but almost nothing on food. No payments at all for Khartoum or Donna. Very little on electricity, none on Hani's broadband connection, which meant it was either illegal or someone else was footing the bill.

So far, so predictable.

The surprise was in the brackets that ran like a sour river along the bottom line. Picking 1 January as a date and flicking back year on year showed that her account had been overdrawn for at least ten years, which was as far back as Raf bothered to check. Not huge amounts in someone like Hu San's terms, but getting larger and literally in the red. Until this April.

'Shit.' Raf was talking to himself but Hani squinted at the screen as he highlighted a figure. Hamzah had lied. She hadn't taken him for $2,500,000: her commission had been double that. $5,000,000 from Banque Leventine in Cyprus. Straight in and straight out again, almost immediately, only this time in two amounts. $4,500,000 to an account in El Iskandryia and $500,000 to Havana.

'Let me ...' Small fingers flicked over the keyboard, numbers resolving. The name that came up meant nothing to Raf.

Caja de Cuba.

'Want me to chase it?' Hani's voice was neutral.

'If you can.' Raf had no intention of asking when she'd learned to crack files — or how. He was far too worried she might stop.

'Okay.' And with that Hani squared up to the screen, smiled slightly and let her fingers loose, chasing one link after another, running searches and routines she seemed to pull out of the air. Beside her sat the rag dog, a mechanical whirr coming from its guts like a low growl.

'What..."

'Back up,' said Hani. 'The screen talks to him and Ali-Din remembers.' She sucked at her teeth to signal that Raf shouldn't ask any more questions and went back to work.

'Got it,' Hani said finally. 'Started here/ended Seattle. You want to know everywhere the $500,000 went in between?'

Raf didn't, so Hani cross-referenced the new account number to a customer bank database, which took almost no time at all because — unlike with Banque de Lesseps — the data at the Seattle end wasn't double-encrypted. This time the name meant something. Clem Burke, lately of Hunstville, registered as sole owner of Seattle's newest detective agency.

'Now the next one,' Raf told Hani. But she was already on it, leaning in close as if trying to crawl right inside the screen.

Raf was forgotten, he realized. The world outside did not exist. There was a hunger to the child's face, a intensity that reflected pure concentration. Her brows were knit, her lips clamped tight. This was the other thing in her life over which she'd had control. What she ate and what she did on screen were ring-fenced for her alone. A thin slice of a life that everybody else was parcelling up and deciding for her own good.

Ali-Din was a side issue.

'Got it,' said Hani. Numbers resolved as the screen on the VSV talked via uplink to a datacore at Banque de Lesseps and data fed back, anonymous and cold, nothing but presence and absence of electrical charge until on the other side of the screen to Hani an electron beam rastered down the glass and Hani swore.

H.E. Saeed Koenig Pasha. The General's own personal bank account. Shit indeed. Fear played inside Raf's head like a whistle off the walls of an empty courtyard, heard every day without really hearing, until one stumbled over oneself, sat cross-legged in the dust. Hani broke the connection without being asked.

Next they looked at payments that had come in. And the first and most obvious point was that until the $5,000,000 from Hamzah there had been nothing for at least nine months. Before that, going back five or six years, there had been regular payments, spaced maybe four or five months apart, starting big and getting less and less.

To Raf it looked like someone selling off the family silver and waking up one morning to find it was all gone. Maybe her outgoings would be more use.

'Try that,' he suggested, pointing to a small, fairly regular debit in Nafìsa's account. The last time it had been paid was the day he'd arrived in Iskandryia.

Hani went back to her screen.

Chapter Forty-two 1st August

'You must be Zara bint-Hamzah,' said the boy who opened the door to her. Before she could ask how he knew, the boy had stepped back and was ushering her through the front door of the General's palatial mansion on Rue Riyad Pasha.

He was about her age, maybe slightly younger, dressed in a simple shirt and tan chinos. A faint — a very faint — beard could just be discerned on his face.

'This is where I ask you if you have an appointment to see the General and you say no, but it's very important ...'

Zara nodded.

'A pity. You see, the General never receives anyone without an appointment. It's a matter of principle ...'

'I thought anyone could petition the General?' Zara said. She didn't mean to sound as upset by his news as she did.

'Of course,' said the boy with a smile. 'Anyone can. Just write a note and leave it. In five weeks' time, when the secretariat have worked their way down the pile, someone will read your note and, if necessary, bring it to his attention.'

'What counts as "necessary"?' Zara asked.

'A threat to his life. A threat to the life of the khedive. News of an uprising ... We get a lot of those.' He ushered her though another door into what looked like a dining room, then another, this time into a small study. On the wall was an oil painting of the old khedive and a smaller — if only slightly — portrait of the General wearing full uniform, with a curved sword hanging from his belt. The sword in question stood in the corner of the room, balanced upright like an old umbrella.

'Better not stay here too long,' said the boy. 'He doesn't really like people in his office.' From the top drawer of an ornate desk, he selected a key and used it to open French windows that led out to a garden.

'Come on,' he said, then paused. 'Have you been here before?'

Zara just looked at him until he shrugged.

'I'll take that as a No.'

Tall cedars rose from a lawn that was emerald green. The kind of lawn that old people talked about when they mentioned the mansions that used to line Mahmoudiya Canal, even though they'd never seen the lawns themselves and had only heard of them from their grandparents.

'Underground irrigation,' said the boy. Beds full of red and blue flowers that Zara had never seen before lined the path the boy chose. 'Come on,' he said, so Zara followed..Until he stopped at a metal bench set in the shade of a bush topiaried into the shape of a perfectly crenellated wall, and indicated that Zara should sit.

'No,' she shook her head. 'Not here.' A quick, almost embarrassed flick of one hand indicated him, then herself, the bench and its obvious seclusion. 'How can I?'

The boy looked surprised, but not irritated. 'We can walk,' he said simply and so they did: down another path until they reached a small lake with a fountain. Three stone women wearing very little stood, facing out, with their backs to each other. One of them held an apple and the other two, who were without the first's discreet stone drapery, used their hands to hide stone pudenda.

'Nakedness is not always a sin,' said the boy lightly. Then he smiled and shrugged, before adding, 'But, of course, that sentiment is probably heretical ...'

He led her round the fountain and then down another path that doubled back inside the vee of greenery that the General had carved for himself out of a section of public gardens.

'So tell me,' said the boy. 'What is so important that you need to see the General?'

'I'd prefer to tell him ...'

'No,' he said seriously. 'You misunderstand. The General is unable to see you, so I am seeing you instead. Now, what did you want to say?'

Haltingly, occasionally exasperated with herself, Zara began to tell him about Ashraf. Not everything, because she didn't mention his time in prison or Raf's belief that he wasn't really a bey. But she told the boy about Felix, about how Ashraf swore that his aunt's death was neither suicide nor his doing. Zara talked about how he'd cleaned up the house and asked her father to get rid of the office where his aunt had been killed so as not to upset Hani. And she spoke of Hani and how the child was afraid to leave Ashraf's side ...

Halfway through, the boy insisted they find a bench and walked away without waiting to see if Zara followed, though the bench he found her was out in the open, unscreened by hedges and in full view of the house. 'This man,' said the boy, when Zara finally finished. 'You know where he is hiding?'

The boy sighed at her silence, then shrugged.

'You don't know, and if you did, you wouldn't tell me?'

'Right.'

'Wrong. You do know and you still won't tell me ...' He looked at Zara, his gaze steady. 'I guess that makes it love.'

After he'd listened to all the reasons why he was wrong, they changed the subject and Zara sat down again. 'America,' said the boy. 'You've been there. What's it like?'

'New York,' she corrected, and then she explained in detail why the two were completely different. How New York was really a part of Europe that Europe had mislaid. Explaining this took more time than she intended.

At the front door, as he was showing her out, Zara paused. 'You will tell the General what I said about Ashraf being innocent ... ?'

'Of course.'

'And there's no chance of my seeing the General himself?'

The boy sighed. 'What do you want with Koenig Pasha,' he asked, sounding slightly wistful, 'when you've already seen the khedive?' And he shut the door, politely but firmly in Zara's face.

Chapter Forty-three 1st August

'Ashraf Bey,' said Raf into a brass grille set in a white pillar on one side of a large metal gate. Above the grille a discreet se vende sign from an exclusive realty agent in Rue de Léglise Copte had a simple strip neatly glue-gunned across the top. When Raf put his hand up to check the sold sign, he discovered the glue was still sticky.

There would be a small CCTV watching his every move. Up in a tree, probably, though he hadn't been able to spot it. Unless, of course, the Minister linked direct to a spysat, which was possible. At least ten private houses in Iskandryia were meant to be protected that way.

That it was only ten said something ... On the Upper East Side whole blocks relied on nothing but spysats and a direct line to one of the top-end private police units. His mother had given him the details in one of her last e-mails, he forgot how many years before. She might have written a few more times, of course. Raf didn't know, he hadn't bothered to check that account much.

Static cracked from the speaker grille. 'Ashraf Bey,' said Raf for the third time. So far no one had showed much interest in letting him in. He could scale the gate, no problem. Even the spikes along the top wouldn't give him trouble unless he actually managed to fall on one. Weather, old age and too many coats of paint had made them blunt, almost rounded.

The Minister isn't here.'

'I know that,' Raf said. 'I want to talk to Lady Jalila.'

There was another burst of static and then silence.

'The question,' said a different voice when it came, 'is whether Lady Jalila wants to see you ...' The words were cool, ironic.

'I don't know,' said Raf. 'Do you?'

The click of a bolt recessing was his answer, though no one appeared to show him the way and the mastiff that lolloped across a gravel path towards him seemed not to have been told he was allowed to enter.

'Heel.' Letting his hand brush the mastiff's head, Raf kept walking and heard rather than saw the animal fall into step beside him. No fear, at least not of animals. Let Lady Jalila make of that what she liked.

The house was old made modern. Once-stuccoed walls stripped back to stone and a roof retiled in pale grey slate. Old-fashioned windows had been sandblasted back to bare metal frames, glazed with smoked glass and covered with wrought-iron bars that were ornate and obviously handmade to order, but were bars all the same.

The front door was heavy and studded, pale oak polished to a shine. This could be her taste, or maybe not. It seemed a little too self-consciously modern and American for the Minister but perhaps Raf had misunderstood him.

'Your Excellency is most welcome.' It was obvious from the quiver in the maid's voice that he was anything but ...

'I don't bite,' Raf told her, 'whatever you've read in the papers.' He waited for the French girl to stand aside and when she didn't he pushed gently past, eyes instantly adjusting to the darkness. The decor within was as ruthlessly modern as without. Black floors, glass walls, the only nod to classical taste being two large abstracts, one each side of the hall, on walls that were otherwise bare.

'Rothko,' said Lady Jalila. 'Mid-period. Not his best work but that's all locked up in museums.' She had a glass of clear liquid in one unsteady hand and a tiny pearl-handled revolver in the other.

'Medicinal,' Lady Jalila said, holding the glass up to the light. 'You can ask my doctor.'

'And the gun?'

'Safety, darling. You're a dangerous killer — or don't you catch the news ... ?'

'I've been busy ...'

'Tell me about it. Apparently that little girl you almost married now thinks you're innocent ...' Lady Jalila lowered the revolver and took a gulp from her glass. When she surfaced the glass was empty and even at a distance Raf could smell the gin on her breath. 'But we both know different, don't we?'

The only thing Raf knew was that she was drunk and armed. And if anyone had come up with a more lethal combination than alcohol and a gun then Raf had gone through remand with his eyes closed. 'Look,' said Raf, 'I need to ask you some questions about my aunt.'

'About Nafisa?'

'That and a few other things ...'

Lady Jalila laughed. 'Oh,' she said as she gently touched the barrel of her gun to Raf's cheek, 'I can talk about things for ages. You'd better come up.' She turned towards a rise of open steps, only to turn back. Take the afternoon off,' she told her maid ...

'In here.' Lady Jalila threw open an upstairs door and Raf found himself in a drawing room with a white suede sofa, a long onyx table and floorboards of stripped cedar. Another, much smaller painting decorated one wall. A simple slash of red above a slash of dark blue, the paint thin, uneven and not quite covering the canvas.

'Unique,' she said heavily. 'Worth more than both of the ones in the hall. He didn't see it, of course. Thought it should be cheaper because it was smaller.'

He was the Minister, Raf decided, not Rothko.

Lady Jalila sighed. 'You have no idea how tiresome life can be ...'

Raf looked round at the tiny but priceless Persian rug hung in one corner, the impossibly rich Moroccan burgundy of a leather beanbag big enough for a giant. At the single sprig of flowers in a Venetian vase filling the whole room with a perfume headier than incense.

'No,' he said. 'Probably not.'

Lady Jalila poured him a gin and tonic, dribbling Bombay Saphire over three lumps of ice and adding not enough tonic. A dash of bitters from an unmarked bottle finished the preparation. There was a fresh lime cut into slices on a saucer at the side but she didn't bother to add it to his drink or hers. 'I'd ask you to make them,' she told him, 'but you'd probably only get it wrong. Men do.'

Lowering herself carefully onto the suede sofa, Lady Jalila crossed one leg over the other. She wore a tight blue jacket and matching skirt, which rode up enough at the side to show a long expanse of nylon from knee to hip.

'Well, do you like it?'

Raf dragged his eyes away from her.

'What do you think?' Casually, Lady Jalila uncrossed her legs and leant back, head turned towards the tiny Rothko. Her knees parted. Only slightly, but enough for Raf to see clearly the white thong beneath her tights.

'Interesting,' said Raf.

'Mmmm,' Lady Jalila smiled slightly. 'Public exhibitions bore me, but there's always something about private views ..." She shifted lower in her seat, arms coming round to hug herself until her full breasts were pushed together and outwards.

Raf wanted to keep talking, to keep up the pretence that this was just a conversation but proper words wouldn't come so he just nodded sagely. And all the while, Lady Jalila squeezed at her breasts and squirmed forward on the sofa until both gusset and thong edged up between swollen folds of flesh.

'The Rothko,' asked Raf shakily. 'When did you buy it?' But Lady Jalila wasn't listening. He could see her nipples hard beneath her jacket and each time she hugged herself they scraped against cloth, making her hiss between open lips.

Her foot rubbed his ankle and before Raf could protest her heel had climbed the side of his leg and rested on his groin, grinding down against him. He could have touched the dampness between her legs just by reaching forward. But all he did was watch as she shifted on her seat until the thong stretched so tight it vanished altogether. She was gasping, breathing through her mouth as she stared blindly at a ceiling fan. Lost to the gin and to what was going on between her legs and inside her mind.

She came silently, biting down on a cry as she jacked forwards and then sprawled back, knees wide and arms still clutched across her front.

A lavatory flushed and water ran. A hammering in the pipes went on for too long for it to be a basin being run. Which meant Lady Jalila was taking a bath or shower. For a moment, Raf wondered if he was meant to have joined her under the water, but decided that was unlikely. Most probably she'd forgotten he was even there. She'd certainly forgotten her revolver which rested on the white sofa next to a sweat patch in the shape of Lady Jalila's buttocks. Just as she'd forgotten the handbag beside her discarded shoes on the floor.

Driving licence, snakeskin wallet with mid-denomination notes and three credit cards. Gold but not platinum. So either they weren't as rich as she pretended or else the Minister was less lavish with his bounty than Raf had imagined from seeing them together. There was make-up — Chanel and Dior, predictably enough. A packet of sterile tissues, a packet of Durex Vapour with one condom missing and a half-empty plastic tube of breath mints.

Raf made a note of Jalila's credit-card numbers, wondering as he did so whether Hani would be able to do her magic with them. He looked inside the wallet for a photograph of the Minister, but she carried nothing sentimental except a small colour shot of herself standing on the Corniche. She was a teenager and the smiling woman behind her looked familiar. It was only after Raf had slipped the picture back into Lady Jalila's wallet that he realized the woman was Lady Nafisa, looking younger, happier and almost coy.

Putting aside the wallet, Raf sorted quickly through the remaining objects. A Lotus organizer, a penknife with a mother-of-pearl handle, a pepper spray and a little suede case for holding business cards. Inside were three cards of her own — Lady Jalila, deputy head, Cross & Crescent — an official laminate for entering the Precinct, one of the Minister's own cards, tattered at the corners, and an even more tattered card belonging to Felix.

And then Raf got the information he'd come for, without even having to ask. The last card in the holder advertised an alternative-heath clinic and five dates were scrawled on the back, four of them crossed through, with one due the following week.

Raf slid the card into his pocket, just managing to scoop the rest of the contents back into Lady Jalila's bag and get the bag back on the floor before the door opened.

'How thoughtless,' Lady Jalila said. 'Anna's forgotten to bring you coffee.'

'You told her to take the afternoon off,' said Raf.

'Did I?' Lady Jalila sounded puzzled. She wore black slacks and a white sweat shirt that might have suited a teenager if they were drunk, over-developed and vacant. 'How odd ... So what was it you wanted to ask me about Nafisa?'

There were a dozen places he could start. Beginning with the fact that his aunt had apparently been refilling her personal account with money from a charity of which the woman opposite was now acting head.

The first sum taken had been repaid in full, with interest. The second sum had just been repaid. Half of the next sum was still outstanding and Raf doubted that even Nafisa had been able to convice herself that the following sums were loans only ...

'Well?' Jalila asked. 'What was your question?'

No one Raf recognized stared out of her eyes. The wanton who'd sat opposite him with open knees had gone to be replaced by a prim but slightly swaying woman who smelled of soap, mouthwash and toothpaste.

'Probably not worth troubling you,' said Raf. 'But I'm just tying up odds and ends and I wondered if you knew of a Madame Sosostris?'

'No. I'm sorry.' Lady Jalila shook her head, her blonde curls still damp but already falling perfectly around a face innocent as an angel's. 'That rings no bells at all.'

Raf shrugged. 'Worth a try,' he said. Then he told her he knew exactly who had killed his aunt and asked her to fix him a meeting with her husband. Somewhere neutral. When he let himself out, she was still reciting digits to her wall phone.

Chapter Forty-four 1st August

'I'm armed,' said Hani. 'And I'll fire.'

In trembling hands, the child held a vast pistol with rubber handle and fat red barrel. The kind used to launch distress flares. Pulling the trigger would be enough to toss her backwards across the cabin, if not break both wrists. That it would leave a large hole in whoever was on the other side of the door was a given.

The door to the VSV stopped opening.

'Hani,' said Zara, her shock at meeting the khedive suddenly forgotten. 'It's me ...'

The door started opening again and Zara put her head through the gap, her glance taking in the flare pistol and the tears streaming down Hani's face. 'Hani, put that down, okay?'

The child shook her head. 'Step inside, slowly.' It sounded like something Hani had heard while playing Killer Kop IV.

Zara stepped forward, her hands held up where Hani could see them.

'Right inside,' said Hani. 'Then shut the door.' She was watching not the woman who'd just entered but the space behind her.

'You're alone.' Hani's words were pitched somewhere between statement and question. Only Zara didn't need to reply because Hani was her own answer. Slumping to the floor, Hani pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms tight round them, the flare gun still held in one hand.

Whatever the fear was, it had the child rocking backwards and forwards, eyes screwed shut.

'Honey.' Zara kneeled in front of the girl. 'What's wrong?'

One eye opened. 'It's been h-h-hours,' Hani said furiously. 'I thought you were d-dead.' She stopped rocking and somehow her absolute stillness was almost worse. 'Lady Jalila called me ...'

'Here?'

'Called Ali-Din.' She nodded to the rag dog thrown in one corner. The Germans are coming to kill me. You're to take me straight to her house ...'

Which Germans ... ?

'No one's trying to kill you,' Zara said firmly. 'She's got it wrong.'

The flare gun wasn't even loaded, Zara discovered when she finally worked out how to flip down its barrel. The sobbing child had discovered the device in a watertight cupboard set into a bulkhead. What she hadn't found were any flares. But then, maybe there weren't any, because Zara couldn't find them either.

'We'd better leave,' announced Zara, after she'd wiped the pistol with a rag and put it back in the cupboard, pushing the door so that it popped shut. Quite where they were going was another matter. She only knew it wasn't anywhere near Lady Jalila's house.

Chapter Forty-five 1st August

No signal. No up-link. Nothing.

Raf should have started getting worried when he noticed his Omega had stopped receiving, he realized afterwards. But at the time he figured it was just the usual crap connection.

So he kept heading north towards the address on the card he carried deep in his pocket, cutting through an area north-west of Place Orabi where child brothels used to be, back in the days Constantine Cavafy wrote his poems and Isk was where every would-be aesthete from New York, Berlin and London gathered to savour the exotic. Which usually translated into a taste for young Arab boys, rot-gut arak and opium.

Now the district was filled with hip boutiques, where the swipe of a credit card and the purchase tax-free of this season's Nikes gave jet-trash travellers a similar, more legal thrill.

Half hoping to get a working connection, Raf made his way up a side street towards the Corniche, passing an ancient mosque and a school, coming out at the fish market where picturesque boats were moored off shore to bobbing floats of blown glass. His phone functioned no better there than it had before.

The boats were mostly clinker-built and wooden, brightly coated in blood reds and deep blues, with painted eyes that stared forward. It didn't matter that some had satellite navigation and a few used echo-location to hunt bonito and shark: every family knew that the boats needed to be able to see their way home when the fishing was done.

It made sense to Raf who, by then, was standing with his back to the market, glancing between the card in his hand and a bank of buzzers on a wall. What was Tiriganaq if not his version of those eyes?

No one had answered when he pressed the right button, so he punched five or six wrong ones at random, ignoring the increasingly irritated voices demanding to know what he wanted until eventually someone hit enter, just as Raf knew they would, because someone always did.

He took the back stairs up to the fourth floor because, once again, most people always used the lift. Then he took the lift down a flight to the third floor and knocked on an unmarked cream door.

When no one answered that either, Raf whipped a new screwdriver out of its packaging and positioned it over the point where a strip of wooden frame obscured a Yale lock. One hit with the heel of his hand and the lock was sprung. Which told him two things. Not everything taught at Remand University was bullshit, and Madame Sosostris was nearby. Out for a coffee, maybe, or collecting laundry — whatever ... People gone for longer usually remembered to double-lock their front doors.

A quick glance inside revealed a reception room that could have been for a brothel, a therapist or a chiropractor's. Copies of glossy magazines, a handful of leaflets, mainly about acupuncture. A blank screen on one wall, two crystals dangling on thongs from its bottom corners. Wicker armchairs that looked newish but were already well used.

Then a treatment room, which looked like a coprophiliac's paradise. Raf headed for a filing cabinet, ignoring the four polythene barrels atop metal scaffolding, with gravity tubes that fed down to end in surgical-steel twist joints, just as he ignored a kidney dish — next to a couch — that held various sizes of chrome speculums, each one double-tubed so water could feed one way and bodily waste the other. He needed more proof than a business card that Lady Jalila had been lying.

Raf found what he wanted in a bottom drawer, marked dead accounts; though he didn't think that was meant to be a joke, sardonic or otherwise. Lady Nafìsa had been a client for ten years and there was a long and obsessively regular list of appointments to prove it, written by the same hand using a wide variety of different pens. There was a pattern, Raf realized, and an easy one to break. The pen used to record payment was inevitably the same pen used to make a note in the diary of the next appointment.

But the note declaring the file dead and the line scrawled through Nafìsa's records were in the same ink as the last record of payment, dated the morning she died. Madame Sosostris had known Nafìsa wouldn't be coming back.

And Raf didn't know if it really surprised him or not, but the person who'd originally introduced his aunt to the clinic was the person who said she'd never even heard of Madame Sosostris.

So all he needed to find was—

'Looking for something?'

The question came from behind him and the voice was confident. Which was probably reasonable, given the automatic in the blond man's hand. Though maybe the gun-toting woman at the man's shoulder was also a factor. Both were tall and fair and the last time Raf had noticed either of them they'd been standing by the harbour wall, studying a fold-out map headed Ägypten — Kairo & Alexandria. Something in their smiles told Raf they'd always known exactly where they were heading. And, more to the point, where he was headed as well.

Dancers, Hu San would have called them. Or rather, a dancer and a ballerina.

The woman kicked the door shut with her heel. She wore a straw Panama tipped over one eye and a pale scarf tucked into her silk blouse. They shared the same wiry build, the same almost white hair cropped short at the sides and left to flop forward over pale blue eyes ...

In fact, they looked just like him. Give or take the slightly longer hair and his beard.

'Can I help you?' Raf asked politely.

Neither answered. Neither moved. But it didn't matter, because the fox was awake. Disarm yourself, disarm your enemy, said a tired voice in his head. It sounded cracker-barrel, but Raf recognized it as a koan from the old rasta he'd trained with while on remand.

Raf put up his hands and watched both dancer and ballerina suddenly relax.

'Yeah,' said the man, coming closer. 'We were told you'd be sensible.' He sounded disappointed.

That's me,' said Raf, stepping forward to sweep aside the man's automatic with his left hand, while swinging in with his right elbow, catching him across the throat.

Sometimes you've just got to dance.

Raf uncoiled, right elbow returning to spread the man's nose sideways across his once-handsome face. Balance Raf took out with a simultaneous clap to both sides of the man's head, rupturing the eardrums. He was spared having to thumb the dancer's eyes because the man was already headed floorwards, Raf following hard behind.

As they landed, Raf put one elbow through the dancer's rib cage, driving a fat splinter of bone deep into a suddenly very shocked heart. The stink of open bowels filled the room but by then Raf had rolled sideways across the carpet, the dancer's automatic already in his hand, coming to rest beside a filing cabinet. Either it would give him cover or fill him with shrapnel, depending on what loads the ballerina carried in her gun. It gave him cover, though the only thing to be said for the sudden stench of cordite was that it swamped the smell that came from the body between them.

'Hey.' Raf's voice sounded better than he'd expected, given someone was using him for target practice. 'You want to tell me what this is about?'

He wasn't fussed about giving his position away. She already knew exactly where he was, she just couldn't reach him. 'Well?' Raf said.

Her answer was another slug, slammed into the filing cabinet. In at the front but not, thank God, out at the side. Her big problem was her slugs were small calibre, their load almost subsonic. She'd come carrying brass designed to fire at close range, then rattle round inside Raf's skull magimixing.

'You can put that gun down or I can kill you,' said Raf. It was, he realized, probably the wrong time to start enjoying himself; but knowing that didn't change a thing. His thoughts felt as clear as they'd ever been. And for the first time in years, he wasn't standing on the outside watching himself.

'Make your choice' said Raf, noisily jacking back the slide on his newly borrowed automatic. 'It means nothing to me.'

A slug fired into the filing cabinet gave Raf his answer.

Shaking dust from his short hair, Raf took a look around him. The ballerina had a door behind her to give an exit, if that was what she needed: this he already knew. He had a wall, a filing cabinet and a blind corner without door or window. Not good at all.

On the other hand ... Raf smiled. 'I hope they're paying you well,' he said, doing his best to sound genuinely concerned. 'And I hope you've got insurance. Because the hospitals round here are likely to slice you up for body parts if you look like you can't meet their bill ...'

He paused to let the silence build, thinking himself inside her head until he finally, briefly became her. 'You've still got a chance,' he said. 'Which was more than your friend ever had.'

The answering shot that Raf expected didn't come. And it didn't sound like the ballerina was changing position or anything, because he could hear silence, devoid of even the faintest tread of feet moving carefully over a carpet.

The woman was listening to him, which was her first mistake — probably the only mistake Raf needed. 'Look,' said Raf. 'You've been set up.' He paused again, as if hit by a sudden thought. 'You got a mobile there?'

The woman would have, undoubtedly. A Seiko wrist model or a Paul Smith wallet, the chrome flip-open kind. Something classy but anonymous to let her call in the cleaners when her job was done.

'Call home,' he told her. 'Have your handler access the precinct files, check out Ashraf al-Mansur.'

Nine, three ... three, nine, two ... two, two, five, four, zero, three. She was using something with a keypad and it was a local number, Raf decided, following the dial tones in his head. What was more, she got a connection first time which told him all he needed to know about his own situation.

The woman spoke rapidly, her intonation rising towards the end. Twice she stumbled over her words. Being scared made her unpredictable, which made her dangerous; and Raf seriously didn't want to be on the wrong end of a gun held by a frightened ballerina. Not when more triggers got yanked in panic than ever got squeezed with intent.

'Schisen.' The word was soft, spoken with feeling.

'Ashraf al-Mansur,' said Raf, 'special forces, explosives expert, advanced weapons training ...' He paused, trying to remember what else the kid had put on her list, because it was Hani who'd faked his CV, Raf was certain of that. 'Crack shot, proficient in close combat.' And there was other stuff, real facts that Hani didn't know or couldn't imagine.

'Acute hearing,' said Raf, 'enhanced vision, eidetic memory ... How am I doing?'

He wasn't expecting an answer yet and didn't get one. All the same, the woman's breathing grew shallower, more ragged. Right about now should be when she'd start thinking about how to bring this deal to an exit.

'There's a door behind you,' said Raf. 'Feel free to use it.'

'And get killed on the way out? Spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder?' The blonde woman spat out her words, bitterness battling fear. 'You killed Marcus.'

'I'm sorry,' said Raf. What was more, he meant it. Killing the blond man hadn't been an accident but equally it hadn't been entirely from choice. 'You were set up, both of you. Because whoever sent you knew you wouldn't walk away from this alive ...

'Think about it,' he said as he stood up, staying pressed back against the wall. 'You're disposable. Not to me but to whoever hired you.'

'That goes with the territory.'

'Yeah,' said Raf, 'but what was the franchise? To kill me or get killed yourself? Think about it,' he repeated. Surrendering the protection of his filing cabinet, Raf stepped carefully over the dancer who lay face up, blindly staring at a cracked ceiling. And the bullet he'd been waiting for all his adult life never came.

She was smaller than Raf had thought. Older, too. Her eyes only half watching Raf's gun.

'Your husband?'

'My brother.' She tossed her own weapon onto a nearby chair and peeled off latex gloves. Glancing at Raf for permission to approach the body.

The woman didn't touch the corpse, just kneeled beside it and looked. Her eyes were as dry as her face was impassive. But when she spoke her voice was cracked with tension and raw with anger. And the anger was not directed at him.

'Bastards.'

Raf gave a long low, silent sigh of relief and put the dead dancer's automatic in his jacket pocket. What he'd just achieved was the cerebral equivalent of reversing a throw hold. 'You want to tell me who hired you?'

She didn't, which was exactly what he expected. He wouldn't have believed her anyway. That would have been too easy and these things never were.

'Fair enough,' said Raf. 'But I'd like you to be very clear on one point. I'm already dead. And I'd like you to pass that on ...'

The ballerina glanced up at that and saw Raf's smile. A smile so wintry she wanted to shiver. Very briefly, she wondered what his face would look like without those shades and decided she didn't want to know. Never would be too soon to see him again.

From the bullet-riddled filing cabinet Raf took the files for Nafisa and Jalila, ripped the page that contained Lady Nafisa's last appointment from the clinic diary and grabbed a manila envelope as an afterthought. When he shut the door behind him, the ballerina was carefully picking up her spent brass. One less collection of calling cards for forensics to consider.

Time to change camouflage, Raf decided. The building's elevator only ran as far as the fifth floor, after that it was stairs all the way up to the eighth. On the sixth floor was a communal bathroom for men and a separate one for women, which probably meant no hot water at all on the floors above where the hall carpet grew stained, the paint peeled and the doors became narrow. More importantly still, the locks became old and cheap ...

Raf posted the files and appointments page to Zara, c/o Villa Hamzah. Then, wearing his new washed and untorn jellaba, he ordered a coffee at a café next door to the apartment block and waited. When the dregs of the first coffee got cold, he ordered another and took the offer of an ornate sheesha and the evening paper. For once he wasn't on the front page or on pages two and three. Page four had a small paragraph, no picture. Someone somewhere had taken a decision to turn down the heat.

Raf smiled.

An hour after he'd left the clinic, a black van turned up outside. Largish, oldish, anonymous ... The man in the driving seat clambered out, brushing cake crumbs from dirty blue overalls. Licking the suction strip on an on-call sign, he slicked it to the inside of his windscreen and wandered up to the main door, large toolbox in hand.

Cable repairs ... air-conditioning experts ... 24-hour electrics ... From city to city, the cover rarely changed. The only thing unusual was that it had taken the van an hour to arrive. Since it was unlikely that the firm for which the dead dancer worked was that inefficient, it meant the woman had needed time to say goodbye to her brother. Which was a good sign. At least, Raf thought so.

The coffee was bitter and what little Raf had of the hashish was home-grown and too sweet. But when the man in overalls reappeared Raf knew it had been worth his wait. So he tossed a couple of notes onto his café table and pushed back his seat.

What was left of the dead dancer was being carried out, cut up and jointed in those black bags. And from the frozen stare on the blonde ballerina's face as she trailed after the clean-up man down to his van, it was equally clear she'd been present when the butchering had been done.

That was love of a kind.

Cleaner and woman held a fleeting discussion on the sidewalk. More a quick question and an emphatic answer, really. The man wearing overalls shrugging and pulling himself up into the driver's seat. The ballerina didn't acknowledge his nod or even glance at the vehicle as it slid into the traffic, positioning itself behind a rattling green-painted tram.

She was good at blending, Raf had to give her that. From the flash of a packet, it was obvious her cigarettes were local. Except that no local woman would have smoked untipped Cleopatras; but then, no local woman would have smoked in public. Only she was a tourist, wasn't she? And tourists did stuff like that out of ignorance. Showed their bare arms on the streets, didn't cover their hair, smoked in public. What she didn't do nearly so well was validate her surroundings.

Her gaze slid over Raf. A man, a striped jellaba, spent sheesha in front of him, settling up with the waiter of an Arab café. It wasn't what she was looking for and so she didn't see it. In non-eidetic people, the cortex was wired weird like that.

Cigarette in hand, she flipped open her wallet and made a call, lighting and discarding a second Cleopatra before her handler called her back with whatever information she'd asked for. An address, most probably, given the way she promptly yanked the map from her bag.

Raf and the ballerina moved off together, joined by their invisible thread of anger and need. Raf following twenty paces behind, his head half buried in an evening paper. Moscow Dynamos had destroyed Belgrade Eagles, Danzig had drawn with Naples. Montenegro had been thrashed by Tunis. Thai particular game was being replayed on café screens everywhere, the fact the score was known in no way diminishing the cascade of outrage when a player from Tunis got fouled inside the penalty area.

The Ottoman provinces kept their dislike of Berlin under control but their contempt for Austria-Hungary was legendary.

The significant difference being that the Kaiser had few, if any, Islamic subjects while whole areas of the Austrian Balkans were Muslim ...

The woman went in through one revolving door and came straight out of another, barely bothering to pause in the foyer of the Suq el Meghreb. She was checking for a tail, but Raf was so far back that he'd barely turned towards the first door when she reappeared from the other muttering angrily.

She was coming unravelled in front of him, the slow burn of her shock overriding common sense to such an extent that she patted a bulging pocket and tossed her map into a bin, doubling back barely fifty paces before hanging a left into a blind alley so narrow it was more of a gap between the Suq el Meghreb and a neighbouring warehouse.

There was no way Raf could follow her into the gap without being seen, so he strolled past its narrow entrance, counted sixty and doubled back, glancing in as he walked by. The ballerina had vanished, the cul de sac was now empty.

Raf really didn't like what that said at all, because what it said was that she'd gone upwards and he was going to have to climb .

Chapter Forty-six 1st August

Only tourists ever bothered using the black carriages that plied their trade along the final sweep of the Corniche. Which meant that no one paid much attention to an ancient caleche being pulled past the fish market by an elderly mare: one of a dozen carriages working the Golden Crescent, that strip stretching up from the new Bibliotheka towards the headland and the heavy grandeur of Fort Quaitbey.

'What are we going to do?' Hani demanded, as the leaf springs of their carriage squeeked ratlike over the cobbles. 'Well?'

Zara said nothing. She just watched fishing boats depart, with their square nets raised and the lamps that would lure catch to their net unlit, but Hani wasn't fooled for a minute.

Behind them, Place Orabi burned its eternal flame in the tomb of the unknown warrior, up ahead was Shorbagi mosque, famous for lacking a minaret. Its muezzin called from arcades that looked out over a market square. Just another useless fact her aunt had insisted she know. Hani shrugged. None of it mattered now.

'Well?' she demanded.

'I don't know,' Zara said crossly, but she did. They would go to the address they'd been given. Maybe she should have taken Hani to Lady Jalila's house when the first message came. That way, maybe Raf would still be ... Surreptitiously Zara checked the text she'd copied across from Ali-Din fifteen minutes before, even though she already knew it by heart. Raf murdered. Hani in terrible danger. Meet me at ... No key accompanied the words and at the top the from field was blank. But the text itself was signed LJ, which Zara took to be Lady Jalila. The only relative Hani had, now that Raf was ...

'You're crying again.' Hani said.

Zara shrugged. So what if she was? Stranger things had happened.

'Thought so ...' Hani swapped seats so she could sit next to Zara and put one arm round the elder girl's sore shoulders. 'I'm sorry.'

I don't know how to handle this, thought Zara. She desperately wanted to tell Hani it was all right to cry. Only then there would be two of them turned inside out, exposing their bare flesh to the world. It was unbelievably selfish, but Zara didn't think she could cope with that.

Beyond the mosque was the fish market, shutting up for the night. The cobbled square already hosed down and the kiosks locked shut. What vans were there waited for morning and the new catch. The hum of their refrigeration units a reminder that come dawn the bustle would begin again. Then the catch would be gutted, packed in ice and trucked out along the desert road to Cairo, where it would go on sale in the kind of fishmongers that required those serving to wear striped aprons and use French names for everything. The kind of place her mother talked about without ever having been to one.

'Faster,' Zara told the coachman, who scowled but still cracked his whip at the grey. He'd spent a good hour taking his caleche slowly up and down the Golden Crescent at Zara's request and now she wanted speed. Reluctantly, the grey rose to a trot.

Turn here,' Zara ordered but the coachman shook his head, reining in.

'Can't leave the Corniche,' he protested. 'Regulations. I can take you further up or I can take you back, but I can't leave the esplanade.'

'Great,' Zara muttered, but she was talking to herself.

'It's all right,' said Hani, stuffing Ali-Din into a new rucksack, bought that morning. 'We can easily walk from here.' The child wore new jeans that matched her rucksack, and a white Hello Kitty tee-shirt still creased from its packet. Her usual buckle shoes had been replaced with stack-heel orange flip-flops and her long hair had been cut until it was as short as Zara's own.

Zara wasn't sure about that last touch. But Hani had demanded it, sitting on a stool in the VSV until Zara hurriedly used scissors to send long dark strands tumbling to the floor. And, in a way, Zara was flattered: they looked more like sisters now — and that had made shopping for clothes less risky.

Normality was difficult for both of them, Zara discovered. Almost everything Hani knew about life she'd learned through a screen. The crowds worried her, the noise worried her, the street smells she found so fierce that she took to holding her nose until Zara told her to stop. Too many people were watching. She didn't understand that money had to change hands before something could be taken from a shop. Somehow, it was as if many of the most basic rules weren't in her book. On the other hand, she could date buildings just by looking at the brickwork. She knew exactly who or what every street had been named after. And passing a Radio Shack with a flickering screen in the window, Hani dashed in to reset it almost without breaking stride.

As for her, Zara knew she belonged to Isk, but the Isk she belonged to didn't yet exist. Hers would be a city where men of her own race didn't expect her to step into the road so they could pass. Where robed clerics didn't glare to see a woman and child out on the streets alone. And where shopkeepers didn't look over her shoulder to see who was paying.

But they tried hard to be normal and blend in. Together they ate crepes from a market stall like tourists, drank warm mineral water that fizzed from its bottle and glued their fingers together with sticky almonds. Standing with their backs to Place Zaghloul, they'd watched grown men crash stunt kites into the waves and then jerk the kites skywards, swirling tails scattering silver drops of water.

Happy almost.

Until news of Raf's death came and their fragile, almost-happiness fractured down the middle as Zara suddenly found herself more scared and more alone than she dared admit ...

Seventy dollars for a caleche along the Corniche was outrageous. Snapping shut her wallet, Zara took Hani by one hand and walked away without a backward glance. Less than five minutes later they were both stood in front of an oak door so sun-blasted the last traces of paint had peeled away to leave only bleached wood cut by darker grain.

'Is this it?' Hani asked doubtfully.

Zara checked. 'Yes,' she said, trying to sound confident. 'We're here. Do you want to ring the bell?'

Hani shook her head. 'You do it.'

Zara didn't recognize the grim-faced blonde woman who answered the door. But it was hard not to notice that she was holding a flick knife and that there was blood on the blade.

Chapter Forty-seven 1st August

Hell didn't reside below any more than paradise resided above, whatever stories that child spun her rag dog. Hell was being suspended, like pain, between dirt and a darkening sky.

Someone up there was screaming, but Raf kept telling himself it wasn't a voice he knew. A bloody cut disfigured his mouth where he'd chewed his bottom lip ragged with frustration. He wanted to climb higher, needed to. Because he had to follow the ballerina, but his arms would no longer work and his legs were far too busy holding him fast to pay too much attention to any orders his mind might send.

Raf wasn't afraid of heights. He'd never been afraid of heights. What he was afraid of was falling. Falling and flames. But above and beyond need and fear, what he really wanted to know was just where the fuck the fox had gone now ...

He was breaking into a spice house by levering himself up a narrow gap between the spice house and the facing wall of an adjoining suq: that was the theory, anyway. Proper climbers had a name for gaps like that. Only, proper climbers also carried equipment and, on the whole, didn't spend their entire lives terrified of falling from high places.

Sweat stained his shirt. He could feel the perspiration beneath his hair, under his arms and in his groin. A long slick of wet enamelling his spine.

Beyond scared, you reach a place that is almost beyond being ashamed. But only almost. Hani was up in that room, Zara too. From the moment Raf had recognized their voices he'd known that up there was where he had to be, desperately had to be, and only a memory of silver rain was stopping him.

And the really sick joke was, Raf wasn't even sure the silver rain was real. He, who never cared enough about anyone to be truly afraid for them, was terrified that Hani might be killed. And as for Zara ... If he hadn't vomited already he'd be doing it again, beyond doubt.

Below him, between the suq and the spice house was the tiny blind alley down which the ballerina had vanished. At its end was a tiny courtyard belonging to the spice house. One back door, padlocked, one CCTV camera for security, nothing fancy; even adjusting his eyes across their whole spectrum hadn't revealed any trace of hidden beams.

As for dealing with the camera, Raf had justified being there by clumsily yanked up the front of his jellaba and unlaced his fly, at the same time as snatching a quick look around. To his right had been the red-brick wall, to his left the yard, little more than a token reminder of a larger one that had existed back before the suq was built. Above him a distant cast-iron loading boom jutting from the side of the spice house, its wheel rusted tight. The open window just below it had looked very far away.

Ambling back up the alley until he was out of camera range, Raf had jumped, feet jamming against the wall on both sides. He'd seen it on screen, mountaineers straddling a gap and climbing effortlessly, leaving the ground far below them. He managed four, maybe five awkward hops.

It wasn't pain in his ankles or lack of skill that stopped him. It was looking down. Down onto a drop of no more than three metres, but it was enough. Vomit rose barometer-like in his throat, spewed between rictus lips and trickled to the ground below, leaving memory etched on his palate as an aftertaste.

Open the door.

Can't.

Open the door.

No.

The voice of waves, other children shouting. Later on, in another place, he'd had to push one of them downstairs to cure that. Threw a knife across a crowded dining room so that it nailed a wooden beam beside another's head. Sheer luck but impressive.

Fear of heights or fear or falling? They were different. That difference had been explained to him at length by a psychiatrist at Huntsville, who masked her stink with cologne and scuttled sideways into rooms like a crab, because that was the only way she could fit through the door.

Apparently the height/falling difference mattered. Until he recognized which one it was, nothing could be done to cure what was a simple, almost boring phobia. All he had to do was watch some films and tell the fat woman what he felt.

Only Raf felt nothing as he looked at pictures of smiling children climbing frames or slides, shinning up ropes and leaping off walls. He didn't know any of them. And how he felt when he looked down couldn't be described. Not in words a child might use and certainly not by the adult that child became.

If he fell now and rolled on landing, he could walk away with nothing worse than a few bruises. Every shuffle upwards increased that danger. A few more shuffles and it would be a broken ankle rather than bruises, then a leg or hip. Much higher than that and his spine would concertina. At the top, where he needed to go, where muted screams broke through the open widow — fall from there and his vertebrae would be crushed on impact. He knew that for a fact.

Very carefully, Raf twisted round until his back pressed against the suq's brickwork and his feet jammed hard against the crumbling warehouse wall. It felt safer than straddling the emptiness. By shuffling his back and straightening his legs he might be able to inch his way higher. All it would take would be for him to conquer one simple, irrational fear.

All. Darkness swept in against the edge of his thoughts every time Raf glanced down. And the alley floor sucked in his concentration like a singularity swallowing light. Until looking away became nearly impossible, climbing ditto.

Crying with frustration, Raf made himself stare up at the window, its shutter swinging slowly in the evening breeze.

Everything he needed to become was on the other side of that. Zara, Hani, the ballerina ... And whatever the ballerina was doing, that was something he needed to know about.

Hey, dead boy, the voice in his head was mocking. Recognize where you are?

Raf did. He'd been there before.

Chapter Forty-eight Switzerland

Outside was silver rain.

Inside a fox cub coughed, thin shoulders heaving and skull flat to the floor. The door stood ready to be opened, buckled by the noise and anger of what waited on the other side.

He touched the handle.

Skin seared and the boy's fingertips vaporized, fragments of skin left sticking to the red-hot door knob as he yanked back his hand. He wanted to cry but he was doing that already.

It was nothing, he'd been telling himself... Nothing seeping under the door, nothing pushing past the sodden towels he'd used to close out the gap; but he could no longer pretend. Tears dripped unnoticed onto his red wool dressing gown.

He could smell burning and the smell came from him.

All the boy had to do if he wanted to live was turn the handle and yank back the door. It was that simple. The alternative was to die in peace, letting go any last shred of hope that stuck to his soul the way his burnt skin was glued to the door handle. Die, or walk out into the silver rain. Into the Hell pastors talked about in chapel.

Water still trickled from the cold faucet but it was boiling now, steam rising from the basin as he turned on the tap. A gravity-feed cistern in the roof behind him supplied water and the noise had not yet reached his stretch of attic.

Stripping off, the boy screwed up his dressing gown and held it under the water, burning his already burnt fingers. When the cloth was completely sodden, he wrapped it around his body. The dressing gown wasn't long enough to protect his ankles or calves but it would cover the rest of him, for what that was worth.

He opened the door by gripping its handle through cloth from his gown and twisting. And when steam hissed from beneath his fingers, the boy knew he should have dealt with the door first, when the dressing gown was still dry, rather than this way round. Logical rather than lateral, he wasn't as good at that as his mother's friends expected.

But this wasn't a test.

Taking a deep breath, he threw back the door and stepped out. There was no ground, no walls, no roof above him. Only a red glow. A darkness of night sky held back by flame. The silver rain had almost finished, thick drops of lead trickling down from gutters to evaporate into dark smudges on fire-scarred walls. Surrounding him was what was left of one attic and between him and the next surviving attic lay nothing but a smouldering pit of fire bisected by a black steel girder that stretched over empty space.

The noise of the flames had grown softer. Burnt out, along with the west wing of the school. There was fire behind him, scavenging its way like cancer along the building, shattering walls, melting lead and eating through wooden beams to drop the blazing remains noisily into orange cinders below.

Firemen had seen him now. That became obvious when a spotlight almost bowled him backwards with shock. Someone swore, their words made puny by distance and flame, and the light snapped out. So the boy shut his eyes and let them adjust, calling up darkness in his head. Waiting until the extraneous noise died and the orange glow behind his eyelids slid away.

When he looked again, the pit was back, framed round with darkness and night, while tiny grey bats of ash spiralled high into the air.

'Stay there.' Words loud enough to come from God bellowed from a hand-held loudspeaker somewhere below. 'You're safe there.'

The boy shook his head. The man lied, probably not intentionally. But only because the man wasn't where he was, so didn't know any better.

He was going to die or he was going to live: the choice was his. Not their choice, his choice. He and the fox were the ones who had to walk the abyss.

On the far side of the attic, a tall ladder was sliding upwards in a fluid sweep of hydraulics, a man balanced at its top. The man wore dark blue overalls and a yellow helmet with a bump across the top like a ridge of bone. A night visor covered his eyes and nose, and on his back was an oval oxygen tank. One of the new models, doughnut-shaped with a hole in the middle. He was mouthing words the boy didn't wait to hear.

'Time to go,' said the boy.

Claws needled into the flesh of his shoulder as he tightened his grip on the scrabbling animal. Of course the cub wanted out of there, so did he, and that meant crossing the iron beam. He didn't blame the fox for not being happy, but it wasn't helping.

The iron beam was recent: put there within the last seventy years to brace internal walls of a Swiss arms dealer's mansion originally built for show rather than quality. The beam and its bracing were the only thing stopping the wing of the Swiss boarding school falling in on itself.

Flames flickered below him, held in check by fire hoses but waiting, gathering themselves to explode upwards and sweep away the last fragments of his attic. This was life.

He shook his head crossly, flipping blond hair into already stinging eyes. He didn't like the school and didn't want to be there. He couldn't see the point of useless tests or running through brambles in the rain. It wasn't even the exercise he minded. It was the other pupils. The ones who never saw what he saw.

There were tears in his eyes again, but he couldn't work out why. Maybe he was just scared. That was allowed, wasn't it?

Except it wasn't.

Boys like him weren't scared. They did the stupid, the splendid and the impossible without making a fuss. They walked out along red-hot—

'Enough already,' said the fox. 'Move it.'

The beam was sticky underfoot. But that was the soles of his slippers melting, each step leaving a black footprint on the beam behind him.

Heat rose as if from a furnace, billowing his dressing gown until it blew out like a limp balloon. It was hotter than the wall of heat he'd hit that time stepping off a Boeing onto the tarmac in Singapore.

His mother had been photographing tigers then. Not the original singha after which the island had been named, but the new ones, the re-introduced ones that kept dying because there was nothing in the wild for them to eat. The director had offered to pay for her to bring her kid along: it added human interest to the other sort.

Bubbling step followed bubbling step. The next one would take him to the middle of the scorching beam, then he would have to do what the fox said. Not that he could turn round; any more than he could stop the soles of his slippers bubbling, molten rubber blistering the bottom of his feet.

Going on was his only option. The burning pit wasn't there. The beam was just a line he'd scrawled on a floor to amuse himself, a crack along the edge of some floorboard. Reality was what he wanted it to be, what he made it.

Staring straight ahead, the boy wrapped the struggling fox tight in his arms, buried his cheek into hot fur and walked across the remaining stretch of beam onto the front page of next morning's papers.

Fox Saves Boy — only the Enquirer got it right.

Fear, shadow and tears gave his childish face the tortured beauty of an El Greco saint. No one mentioned that he owed the anguish which twisted his mouth to a terrified fox cub chewing chunks out of his shoulder.

By the time a teeshirt was being faked in sweatshops in Karachi and sold on street stalls in London and Paris, he was gone. No longer aware of the fuss, no longer watching the screens. He had more important things to talk about — his mother was coming herself to collect him.

She flew into Zurich first-class on Lufthansa and the ticket was free, like the cars and hotels. Reporters met her at Kloten and photographs of him being hugged by a thin woman in a long black coat with shades, were syndicated worldwide. There were some long-lens pap shots from a brief stay-over at the George V in Pans — all flat surfaces and squashed depth of field — but no one got real access until London.

A man Raf didn't recognize — who called his mother Sally a lot and looked at her ankles — sat on a chair in a BBC studio on the outskirts. Hot lights blazed above the boy, raising beads of sweat under his newly cut hair. The fox cub sat on his lap, pinned by his hand to the grey flannel of his school trousers.

The trousers and tweed coat were a compromise. He wore school uniform for the interview and the school in Zurich didn 't charge a term's notice for removing him as a pupil.

Everyone won except Raf.

On the studio wall was a bare blue screen. On it the people at home would see whatever the producer wanted them to see. Mostly this was a long shot of the boy balanced high on the iron beam, his face raised to heaven.

When the man had finished asking his mother how she felt about having a child who was a hero ...

She was glad he'd rescued the fox.

What was she photographing now ...

An endangered seal colony on the Falklands.

What would she and Raf be doing next ...

Spending some quality time together at a friend's apartment in New York.

When all that was over, the man who called his mother Sally turned to the boy and, pasting on a sympathetic smile, asked how he'd felt up there on the beam.

The man wasn't happy with the boy because the producer had already halted the interview once, after a sound man complained he kept unclipping the button mike fixed to his school collar.

'Well?'

What had he felt? He wasn't too sure he'd felt anything at all. Mostly he'd been busy keeping his head empty.

'Were you scared?'

Only of having nearly killed the fox. Despite himself, despite not allowing himself feelings, the boy's eyes misted and for the first time since he'd reached the top of the fire truck's ladder, his mouth trembled.

It was like punching a button. Repressed irritation segued into instant sympathy as the interviewer's face softened. The man rephrased the question, glancing only once at the camera.

The boy thought about it. He still didn't know how he felt but now everyone was waiting, his mother's pale eyes fixed on him, her face tense.

'I can't sleep,' said the boy finally. That at least was true. Always had been. Darkness unravelled in front of his eyes in minutes that ticked by so slowly it was like living inside freeze-frame.

'Dreams,' said the interviewer. 'I can understand that.' He glanced at Raf's mother, his look conveying just the right amount of compassion mixed with an unspoken question.

'He'll be seeing the best child therapist in New York.'

The interviewer nodded. Debated the propriety of asking his next question and asked it anyway. 'When you do sleep,' he said, 'what exactly do you see?'

Nothing, that was the real answer. A brief darkness that swallowed emotion, fear and guilt. But, glancing round the studio, Raf knew that wasn't the right answer and he was learning fast that 'real' and 'right' were different things.

'Flames,' he said simply. 'I see flames.'

The producer brought the interview to a quick halt after that. Time was needed in the cutting suite and they had an actor from the National standing by to voice-over the links needed to tie the interview into existing footage of the fire.

In the hospitality room afterwards, hardbitten hacks wrapped heavy arms round the boy's tense shoulders and told him how brave he was. And all the while, the boy stood clutching a glass of orange juice and wondering why none of them had thought to ask him how the blaze got started in the first place.

Chapter Forty-nine 1st August

Some sense of meaning was there, just about. Hidden beneath animal howls that ended in choking silence. Stb pzzz. But the German ballerina had no interest in stopping, not yet. Not until Madame Sosostris told the ballerina why she' d been hired. Only Madame Sosostris wasn't saying, because refusal was the only thing keeping her alive — although that definition was becoming increasingly loose.

Sighing, the ballerina lit another Cleopatra and inhaled deeply, letting the smoke dribble from her mouth. Then she inhaled again, and stubbed the cigarette out in the screaming woman's navel.

Zara put her hands over her ears.

Ashraf was dead. Someone she knew and liked had been murdered. Maybe more than liked, if she was honest. Now she'd walked Hani straight into a trap. Zara had brains, she had courage, she should have been planning their escape but somehow...

All she wanted to do was cry. Zara was disgusted at her own cowardice. The kid, on the other hand seemed almost oblivious, only glancing up from where she squatted beside Ali-Din whenever another cigarette went out.

Outside, late evening leeched daylight from the sky. Lights would be coming on along the Corniche, the fish restaurants shuffling tables as tourists finished their supper and locals arrived to eat, children in tow. And, sitting alone in his study, nursing an illegal whisky, her father would be checking his messages and trying not to worry. She could look after herself, that was what he would tell himself because that was what she'd spent the last five years telling him, every opportunity she got.

She was sorry to have let him down.

'It's okay.' Hani squeezed Zara's hand. 'Raf will be here soon.'

'Raf's dead, honey.'

'No,' said Hani, as she tucked her wriggling rag dog tight in her arms and stroked its ears. 'He's just late, as usual ...'

They both waited at one end of a spice-drying attic, or maybe it was a mezzanine. Whatever, it filled a third of the length of the building and was a simple platform, hung under the roof and anchored to an end wall. Slit windows in that wall let in air and would have looked down onto a street if only the street hadn't been so narrow or the windows set so high. That was the end where rickety stairs led up from ground level. At the other end of the platform, a simple rail separated the edge from a drop to the floor of the warehouse far below.

Light came from a single bulb that hung like a fat water drop at the end of an age-blackened twist of flex. The room it revealed was functional. A place of sour-smelling leaves drying on canvas tarpaulins, of peppery herbs hung from crude beams, each brittle bunch lashed together with rough string. The same type of string that bound the elbows of Madame Sosostris tight behind her as she lay quivering face up on a medical couch, knees wrenched back and ankles lashed to her elbows so that her arched body was taut beneath a short Muji vest which was all that she now wore, hi Berlin that position was called 'Teasing the Rat'.

The more Zara tried not to think about what that couch was actually doing there, the nastier her suspicions became. Full pharaonic circumcision, which used to be called female infibulation was illegal in Iskandryia. But then, so was abortion and the little silver trolley with the surgical trays could have been for either — or even for both.

Beside her, Hani suddenly sneezed at the dust in the air.

The ballerina paused. 'Gesundheit', she said, sounding distracted. And then went back to heating the tip of her flick knife with a Zippo.

Black carob, henna and oregano, chilli and ginger. Their scents clashed with each other and with the smell of cumin, coriander and frying garlic that drifted up from a distant street stall. But rich as the mix was it wasn't enough to hide the stink of fear that rose from the tethered herbalist.

'Tell her,' Zara pleaded.

The ballerina smiled.

'Please.'

'Ja,' said the blonde German, as she pressed red-hot metal into the inside of the bound woman's thighs. 'Explain who really hired me and maybe I'll let you live ... But then again, maybe not.' She jerked the blade sideways.

Blood ran between Madame Sosostris's legs in a trickle like scarlet tears.

'Tell me,' suggested the ballerina.

'What's to tell ... ?' The question bubbled between bitten lips. 'I hired you. I didn't know he was dangerous ... I made a bad mistake.'

'No,' said the ballerina. 'Not you. Someone else ordered you to hire me.' She pivoted on her heel and buried rigid fingers into the side of the arched woman, ignoring piss that spread across wipe-clean leatherette and dribbled floorwards, following blood down a crack in the boards. And in the silence between falling drips Zara heard a knock at the door below and then the sudden jagged trill of a bell, so loud that even the ballerina jumped.

'Expecting someone?' she demanded, holding her blade close to her victim's eye. Madame Sosostris shook her head.

'Well?' The question was shot behind her, at Zara.

'No,' said Zara.

The ballerina turned back to her victim. 'Well, now,' she said, listening to a second, more impatient ring from below. 'Maybe we can kill you, after all. Okay, you ...'

Zara nodded.

This is how it works ... You answer the door and the child stays there. Any problems and ...' She flicked her knife sideways, leaving Zara no doubt what would happen to Hani's throat.

Zara went. Walking slowly down the ancient stairs until she reached the main door to the spice house. A big part of her wanted to keep walking, out of that door and into a world where upstairs wasn't happening. But she knew, stupid or otherwise, she'd probably die rather than leave Hani.

'Who is it?' she demanded.

'Me.' Lady Jalila's voice was scared or furious, but through an inch of sheet steel it was hard to tell which. 'Now open up, quickly...' She pushed at the door, then visibly jumped when she saw it was Zara. 'Where is Madame Sosostris?'

Zara pointed to the ceiling.

'And you brought Hani?'

Of course she'd brought Hani. This was where the message had told them to come. Zara nodded.

'Good.' The woman pushed past Zara and headed towards the stairs without needing to be shown the way. 'I'll be taking her with me.'

'Lady Jalila ...'

'What?'

What indeed. Zara thought of Hani upstairs and the blonde woman with her cold northern eyes and hot blade and said nothing. Besides, something was wrong. What did Lady Jalila mean, asking if Hani was there? Here, still? Here, now? Where else would the child ...

'Lady Jalila.'

'Well?' The woman's eyes flicked from Zara to dark drips on the floor behind her. And when she stayed silent, Lady Jalila sighed. 'Leave it to me,' she said, reaching into her pocket. 'Just leave it to me.'

The rest Hani and Zara reconstructed from memory. Remembering most a pas de deux faster and more intricate than any they'd seen on a newsfeed.

Sound travels relatively slowly but, being cool-loaded and thus subsonic, Lady Jalila's first bullet travelled more slowly still, which meant it wasn't quite the surprise to the ballerina that it might have been. Though by the time Hani looked up, the German's blonde hair had finished streaming out behind in a sticky white, grey and red plume.

The .38 hollow-point entered the ballerina's head just below the jaw, passed through her soft palate and removed what had until then been the back of her skull, sucking out blood, bone fragments and grey jelly to splatter them over the brick wall behind.

A split second after her head flicked back, the woman's bowels and bladder loosened and her body stepped back, exploded blue eyes staring blindly at nothing. The crash the ballerina made as she hit the boards was loud enough to echo through the almost empty building.

'Mid-period,' muttered Lady Jalila, surveying the wall. 'Maybe mid-to-late ...' Her eyes swept over the attic to take in Hani with her rag dog, the dead ballerina and finally, scornfully, Madame Sosostris hog-tied on the couch.

'Murderer.'

Before Zara could protest, Lady Jalila brought up her gun and yanked the trigger three times. Hollow-points took Madame Sosostris in the upper body, splintering ribs into bone fragments. Lungs collapsed as the first two bullets blossomed into sucking wounds in her side, the final shot taking Madame Sosostris sideways through the heart and blasting her off the couch onto the floor.

The gurgling stopped.

'She hired the German to kill Ashraf,' Lady Jalila said as if that explained everything, though whether it was said to Zara or herself wasn't clear. Walking over to the dead woman by the bed, Lady Jalila lifted a scalpel from a metal dish and slashed the twine binding her arms and feet. Then she rolled the sticky twine into a neat ball and dropped it into her pocket. She placed her own .38 in the dead herbalist's hand.

'We'll tell the police they shot each other.'

It wasn't a suggestion.

'Just leave the official stuff to me,' said Lady Jalila. 'Okay... ?' Without waiting for Zara's answer, Lady Jalila walked across to where Hani sat, hugging her knees and clutching her rag dog.

'Time to take Ali-Din home.'

Hani shook her head. 'You killed her,' she said, voice empty.

'Of course I killed her,' said Lady Jalila. 'There was no choice.'

Only the child wasn't talking about the blonde German, Zara realized. Or about Madame Sosostris. And everything fell into place as if the answer had always been right there, just waiting for Zara.

Cold.

Staggers.

Hallucinations.

'The pen was a side issue,' Zara said without thinking. 'Lady Nafìsa died from poisoning.' And she suddenly knew exactly how the woman standing in front of her had done it. Except that by then Lady Jalila was crouching beside the dead herbalist, taking back her own gun.

The next bullet she fired took Ali-Din through the head.

Chapter Fifty 1st August

Always count the guns.

Crouching by the window, company to fat-toed geckos that had grown used to his stillness, Raf whispered it again — just in case he forgot. Counting the guns had been rule one, according to Hu San; and Raf had made a special point of remembering the things Hu San told him.

The automatic would belong to the ballerina, only she was dead. Raf had heard that happen. Lady Jalila had the revolver, subsonic slugs but unsilenced barrel, because silencing a revolver was a contradiction in terms. From an empty plastic coke bottle taped to the muzzle to the most expensive hand-turned tungsten mutetube, nothing actually worked. Some of the shock wave always forced its way between cylinder and chassis.

If you needed to mute a revolver then the answer was to self-load the brass and use less charge, which was what she'd done. Whether or not in imitation of Thiergarten dogma, Raf didn't know. But, either way, just knowing how to do it made her a professional in his eyes.

The ex-ballerina had a gun, so did Jalila and so did he ... Three in total, if he didn't count the one he'd lifted from the dead dancer. Which made it four functioning weapons. Quite how knowing that helped him Raf had forgotten.

'Enough already ...'

Old words but true ones. Bats echo-located around him through the warm night air, taking moths in mid-flight, each curving strike almost surgical in its precision. Their echo bounced off shutters, refracted from high walls or vanished through open windows to return milliseconds later. Cold and mysterious, like some distant music of the spheres.

There was a tom cat lurking in the dirt of the alley floor far below, its heavy shoulders hunched and thick muscles locked in anticipation as it walked, oblivious, round Raf's discarded jellaba and shades, tracking whatever vermin hid behind the rubble. If the cat was dimly aware of the spiralling almost-mice, it didn't allow them to put it off the prey within reach.

Yet another city within a city, world within world. A metropolis of wild dogs and feral cats, rats breeding beneath grain silos and mice infesting the cotton bales that waited to be loaded into containers along the dock. Spiders, scorpions, and millipedes fat as callused thumbs, safe from the frail, fly-hunting geckos that haunted the twilight edge of street lights.

Raf twisted his head to one side, easing an ache in his neck. Just holding himself secure in that gap between walls took effort. And if he waited much longer he'd have no strength for what must happen next.

Dead boy.. .It was an odd nickname for a man to give a child. He remembered the man well, with his faltering monitors and flat-lining neurofeedback machines. Remembering never had been Raf's problem. His first identity number, its position over a battered metal hook that took his school coat, the exact marble pattern of tiles along a hospital corridor — he knew them all. Far better than he knew himself, because Raf had been afraid there was no self.

We are the hollow men ... Maybe now, but not back times ... Back then he was just a hollow child, not English/not American, not rich/not poor, not wanted except for his logic skills. He could easily have passed that test. But he thought that if he failed they'd let him go home.

Live with it, as the fox would have said.

The silver rain was finished, almost twenty years before.

While Hani was in there. Zara, too.

And he was out here.

And they both undoubtedly believed he was dead and some days he still was. Some days it surprised him he even had a shadow or that when he stared in the mirror there was a reflection waiting to scowl back. But those days got fewer.

And the fear was gone, burned out. The fox dying too. He was going to have to make his own decisions. And this was the first of them ...

Grabbing the rusty metal bar that had once supported a pulley, Raf kicked off from the spice house wall and let gravity swing him through the open window towards which he'd been climbing.

Things to do, people to become.

Hani was sure she saw a smoke-grey animal leap into the room, becoming Raf as it hit the ground and rolled. When he came upright, Raf's gun was already cocked, its muzzle pointed straight at Lady Jalila's stomach. What Raf didn't do was pull the trigger.

'You.'

He nodded.

'You're ...'

'Dead,' added Hani and Raf nodded, watching the revolver pointed at his chest. Small, elegant, with pearl handles and an over-fussy blue finish that definitely didn't match the dark purple nails of the hand holding it.

Lady Jalila smiled. Her full lips twisting prettily.

'Darling,' she said. 'You kill me, I kill you ... Such a waste, don't you think?' Lady Jalila meant it, too, Raf realized. Her greeting was real. In some warped way she really was pleased to see a man who only that morning she'd arranged to have killed.

'You murdered Felix,' said Raf.

Lady Jalila shook her head. 'Murder has to be intentional. That was an accident.'

'And you expected to get away with it?'

'Oh,' said Lady Jalila, 'I have got away with it... And I'll get away with this too. As will you. You and me, we're different.' Her pale blue eyes swept the room, taking in the dead ballerina and herbalist, then Zara. 'Whereas people like her ...'

'What about people like me?' Zara demanded.

'Disposable.' Lady Jalila shrugged elegantly. 'What on earth made you think you deserved a pashazade?'

'Who said I wanted one?'

Lady Jalila ignored that. 'You know what you lack?' Lady Jalila said as the girl turned away. 'Breeding ... That's why people like you never amount to anything. Ashraf, however ... Who knows? With my help he could be the next Chief of Detectives.'

Looking deep into Jalila's pale eyes, Raf finally recognised the truth. She was barking, completely off the Richter scale. Dysfunctional, deluded, sociopathic ... Exactly the kind of ally someone like him might need to reach the top of the pile.

'Jalila.' He nodded discreetly towards the far end of the mezzanine, where light from the single bulb barely reached.

Tell me how I could get Felix's old job,' Raf said quietly when they got there. 'And then tell me what it's going to cost.' Both of them still held their guns, only now the muzzles pointed at the floor.

'The cost?' In her head, Lady Jalila divided the cost of a box of bullets, deducted the ten per cent discount she got at government shops and divided the remainder of it by fifty. 'In cash terms, about thirty-five cents ...' Her tongue dipped out to lick her bottom lip, its tip moistening already glossy lipstick. 'The how should be obvious.' She glanced towards his gun.

'Kill Zara?'

Too easy,' said Lady Jalila. 'I'll do that myself.'

The floor far below was in darkness. Hollow. Empty. She saw nothing and he saw the same. But with two more colours and in sharper focus. 'Why just Chief of Detectives?' Raf said. 'Why not Minister for Police?'

'What about my husband?'

'Accidents happen,' said Raf. 'Ask Felix.'

'You'd really kill Mushin if I asked?' For a moment Lady Jalila sounded almost interested.

'Why not?' Raf's voice was blunt. 'He's not that rich and I doubt he's much use in bed. What have you got to lose?'

Lady Jalila roared.

'Try me,' suggested Raf, seriously.

'Maybe I will,' said Lady Jalila laughing. 'Once you've met my reserve.'

'No problem.' Raf broke open his revolver as if checking the load. Blued, lightweight and virtually indestructible, the Taurus was a beautiful piece of work. It was also so much usless ceramic and tungsten with its cylinder flipped out to the side like that. Now was the time for her to shoot him if she wanted.

Lady Jalila just looked amused. 'When did you know?'

About the pen being Jalila's inability to resist an artistic flourish? 'Right from the start,' said Raf. He lied. It wasn't until the night on the VSV he'd realized his aunt had been poisoned first, then stabbed later. Two different methods, two different places, same person. And as for Jalila being responsible ... Originally he'd been sure it was the General.

'And you know the really ironic touch?' Lady Jalila's eyes sparkled.

He didn't.

'Nas was mean as sin, but she still paid good money for that colonic ... Of course,' said Lady Jalila, as she reached out with one finger to brush the back of Raf's hand. 'In the end she left me no choice. And she would keep sleeping with my husband.'

'That was your reason,' said Raf. 'Jealousy'?'

'No.' When Lady Jalila shook her head, burnished curls brushed her shoulders and framed an angel's face. 'But it didn't help.'

She stretched lazily, her silk shirt pulling tight. Hani and were Zara invisible to her, Raf realized. All her artfulness was reserved for him.

'Why, then?' Raf prompted.

'The Autumn Ball. No one's meant to hold the chair at the C&C for more than two terms. Nafisa had five and wanted six. It was my turn but she wouldn't resign ...' Lady Jalila sighed, then brightened. 'You really must come. I promise you, this year will be the best ever. Everyone will be there.'

Of course Nafisa wouldn't resign. She couldn't, Raf realized. Not without admitting she'd plundered the accounts.

But what Jalila wanted, she was given. And if she wasn't given it, she took it. He'd known someone else like that: his mother. Raf flicked the cylinder shut on his gun, hearing it click into place.

'And the price I have to pay?'

'Don't be silly,' said Lady Jalila. 'You know it already.'

So he did. Hani.

'On the count of three,' said Lady Jalila. 'Okay?' Tightening her grip on the handle, she turned lazily to face Zara, trigger finger whitening at the knuckle. One, two ...

She made it to the start of three before Raf thumbed back the hammer on his own revolver, swung round and watched Lady Jalila's baby-blues explode with shock. Very slowly, the woman tripped backwards over one kitten heel, and met the rail that might have saved her if Raf hadn't reached down to scoop both feet out from under her.

Time expanded, so that every action took longer than it should have done, including the fall. If she wasn't dead when she went over the rail, the wet thud as she hit concrete confirmed that she was once she reached the ground.

Raf stared briefly down at the smashed body, then back at the child who squatted by a broken rag dog and held the dead ballerina's smoking gun in her hands. She'd understood every nuance of the conversation. Which had been a risk Raf had to take.

'You missed,' Raf told her fiercely. 'Okay?'

Hani weighed next to nothing when he reached her. A bundle of sinew and bone. Terror holding her body so rigid that her arms and legs practically vibrated with fear.

'You missed,' Raf said more softly, stroking the back of her hair. 'I didn't. The police will tell you the same ...' He kept his words simple, hoping that repetition would be enough.

'Do you understand? You missed ..."

Disbelief slowly left the child's eyes and then vanished completely, replaced by tears as her sticklike arms snaked up to superglue themselves round his neck, almost choking him.

Later, when Hani's sobbing had stopped, Raf gently unpeeled her arms and sat himself back against the end wall, his spine pressed hard against rough brick.

Life felt real. This was who he was. He was Ashraf Bey, guardian to Hani al-Mansur and friend of... Raf looked across to the crude window where Zara stood staring at the wall opposite or half watching bats flitter over the rooftops without really seeing them. Well, maybe 'friend' was the wrong word.

'You should talk to her,' whispered Hani from where she sat next to him, knees drawn up, back also pressed to the wall. At her feet was what was left of Ali-Din. Scraps of rag, smashed memory, a cracked lens, fragments of ubiquitous phenolic circuit board ... All that remained of the only real proof that Lady Jalila had stabbed Nafisa.

'Zara?'

When the girl stayed silent, Raf sighed and slowly pushed himself up off the boards. It was evident that she heard him coming from the way her shoulders stiffened at his approach. 'I thought you were dead,' Zara said. 'And then, when you finally turned up, I thought I was dead. I really believed you intended to let her kill me ...'

Underneath the overwhelming smell of past fear was the residue of some cologne, oxidized and turned sour from sweat. But then, God alone knew how he stank — or looked, for that matter.

'So did I,' said Raf.

Zara glanced round at that and their eyes locked, her own dark with felaheen DNA, his chilly and pale as any dawn. He couldn't help it: that was the colour his pre-natal contract had specified.

'Only for a second, towards the end.' Raf shrugged and spread his hands in a gesture as old as humanity. 'Sometimes, believing is the only way to play a part.'

'And I'm meant to accept that?'

'Yeah,' said Raf. 'If I can I don't see why you can't.'

'So what happens now?' Zara's voice made it clear she reserved the right to disagree, whatever his answer.

'We tell the truth.'

'We what... ?'

'We tell the truth,' said Hani sadly. 'It's the one thing nobody can stand.'